Judgment on the eligibility of Horizontal reservation candidates

Judgment on the eligibility of Horizontal reservation candidates

Supreme Court recently cleared the Issue of eligibility of candidates belong to Horizontal reservation to compete for the open category seats.

About the Case

In the instant case, two candidates, one belonging to the OBC-Female and another belonging to the SC-Female participated in the selection process in 2013 for filling up posts of constables in Uttar Pradesh police.

Their grievance was that candidates with marks lower than what they secured had been selected in General Female category disregarding their claim.

The state has horizontal reservations for women candidates, and the state had submitted that it would not be possible to carry forward the vacancies under horizontal reservation to the next selection, in case the appropriate number of candidates for horizontal reservation were not available. The Allahabad high court had accepted this plea.

Judgement of the Court

The court ruled against the Uttar Pradesh government, holding that if a person belonging to an intersection of vertical-horizontal reserved category had secured scores high enough to qualify without the vertical reservation, the person would be counted as qualifying without the vertical reservation, and cannot be excluded from the horizontal quota in the general category.

A similar question had arisen in the case of vertical reservations in the past, and the law had been settled similarly: If a person in the SC category secures a higher score than the cut-off for the general category, the person would be counted as having qualified under the general category instead of the SC quota.

What are vertical and horizontal reservations?

There are 2 types of reservations; 1) Vertical reservation, 2) Horizontal reservation

Vertical reservation: Reservation for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes is referred to as vertical reservation. It applies separately for each of the groups specified under the law.

Horizontal reservation: Horizontal reservation refers to the equal opportunity provided to other categories of beneficiaries such as women, veterans, the transgender community, and individuals with disabilities, cutting through the vertical categories.

Application of the Quotas

The horizontal quota is applied separately to each vertical category, and not across the board. For example, if women have 50% horizontal quota, then half of the selected candidates will have to necessarily be women in each vertical quota category i.e., half of all selected SC candidates will have to be women, half of the unreserved or general category will have to be women, and so on.

Justice S. Ravindra Bhat’s judgment

In his separate judgment, Justice Bhat agreed with Justice Lalit’s main judgment which the latter authored on behalf of the bench, and added a few reasons of his own, which are not opposed to that of Justice Lalit. The features of vertical reservations, according to Justice Bhat, are:

• They cannot be filled by the open category, or categories of candidates other than those specified and have to be filled by candidates of the concerned social category only (SC/ST/OBC);
• Mobility (‘migration’) from the reserved (specified category) to the unreserved (open category) slot is possible, based on meritorious performance;
• In case of migration from reserved to open category, the vacancy in the reserved category should be filled by another person from the same specified category, lower in rank;
• If the vacancies cannot be filled by the specified categories due to shortfall of candidates, the vacancies are to be ‘carried forward’ or dealt with appropriately by rules.