Supreme Court to hear together all petitions challenging 10% quota for poor

The Supreme Court on Friday said it will hear together all the petitions which challenged the bill to provide 10 per cent reservation in jobs and education for the economically weaker section.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi refused to grant urgent hearing of a petition filed by Vipin Kumar Bharatiya, challenging the reservation bill.

Earlier, a petition filed by the organization Youth for Equality sought the quashing of the bill, stating that it violated the "equality code of the Constitution" as reservation on economic grounds cannot be restricted to general category and the 50 per cent ceiling limit cannot be breached. The plea further sought a stay on the constitutional amendment.

"The Constitution (124th Amendment) Bill, 2019 which has been swiftly passed by both houses of Parliament and passed with little debate in the first week of January 2019 is the subject matter of the present challenge on the ground that it violates several basic features of the Constitution," the plea said.

By way of the present amendments, the exclusion of the OBCs and the SCs/STs from the scope of the economic reservation essentially implies that only those who are poor from the general categories would avail the benefits of the quotas, the organisation contended.

"Taken together with the fact that the high creamy layer limit of Rs 8 lakh per annum ensures that the elite in the OBCs and SCs/STs capture the reservation benefits repeatedly, the poor sections of these categories remain completely deprived. This is an overwhelming violation of the basic feature of equality enshrined in Article 14 of the Constitution and elsewhere," the petition stated.

-ANI