{"id":260029,"date":"2022-01-14T16:00:13","date_gmt":"2022-01-14T10:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scconline.com\/blog\/?p=260029"},"modified":"2022-01-21T10:18:29","modified_gmt":"2022-01-21T04:48:29","slug":"sc-interprets-section-3-second-proviso-of-cei-act-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scconline.com\/blog\/post\/2022\/01\/14\/sc-interprets-section-3-second-proviso-of-cei-act-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"No more uncertainty over fixation of percentage of reservation for OBC and SC\/ST candidates; SC interprets Section 3 Second Proviso of CEI Act, 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"

Supreme Court<\/strong>: The bench of L. Nageswara Rao and Hima Kohli, JJ has held that the formulae for fixing the percentage of reservation for the SC and ST candidates and for determining the percentage of seats to be reserved for OBC candidates under the second proviso of Section 3 of the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006, ought to be gathered from the same source and any other interpretation would lead to uncertainty.<\/p>\n

Factual Background<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

The Court was hearing the appeal from the judgment of the Manipal High Court wherein it was held that after the amendment of the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006 , in the year 2012, on introduction of the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Amendment Act, 2012 , Manipur University is required to follow the reservation norms of 2% for the candidates belonging to Scheduled Caste, 31% for the Scheduled Tribes and 17% for the Other Backward Classes for purposes of admission in the University.<\/p>\n

The candidates belonging to the SC category and had applied for admission in various Post Graduate courses, had questioned the purported reduction of the quota for SC category candidates from 15%, as prescribed in Section 3 of the Reservation Act to 2% and filed a writ petition in the High Court of Manipur. It was contended that the Amendment Act was legislated to ensure that reservation for SC and ST candidates as prescribed in Section 3 of the Parent Act, should not be reduced from the benchmark of 15% and 7.5% respectively. Rather, the Amendment Act contemplates that the percentage of reservation for SC and ST candidates earmarked in Section 3 of the Parent Act could be increased even to the detriment of the earmarked percentage of reservation for OBC candidates, to ensure that the overall limit of 50% reservation for SC and ST candidates taken collectively, is not disturbed in any manner.<\/p>\n

Analysis <\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

Observing that once the two provisos were inserted in Section 3 of the Parent Act by virtue of the Amendment Act, the general norms of reservation as laid down in Clauses (i), (ii) and (iii) of Section 3 of the Parent Act had to be restricted in terms of the said provisos, the Supreme Court gave the following explanation:<\/p>\n

While the first proviso deals with \u201cState seats\u201d, if any, in a CEI situated in tribal areas referred to in the Sixth Schedule to the Constitution, the second proviso addresses a situation where there are no State seats in a CEI and the seats reserved for the SC\/ST candidates exceeds the percentage specified under Clauses (i) and (ii) of Section 3 (viz., 15% seats for SCs plus 7.5% for STs, totalling to 22.5% seats) or if the combined seats reserved for the SC and ST candidates exceeds the sum total of the percentage as specified under Clauses (i) and (ii).<\/p>\n

Two riders have also been dovetailed in the second proviso to Section 3, namely Clauses (a) and (b).<\/p>\n