Creamy layer politics :P Radhakrishnan
October 30, 2008: The New Indian Express
One step forward, two back’ is perhaps the most apt shibboleth for India’s ongoing reservation rigmarole. To begin at the beginning, in the Supreme Court rulings of November 16, 1992 in Indra Sawhney and Others vs. Union of India, eight out of the nine judges decided to exclude the advanced sections from the OBCs. Their reasoning was: in a backward class if the connecting link is social backwardness, it should broadly be the same in a given class; if some members are far too advanced socially (which in the context necessarily means economically and, may also mean educationally) the connecting thread between them and the remaining class snaps; they would be misfits in the class; after excluding them alone,would the class be a compact class; and in fact, such exclusion benefits the truly backward.
Six of the judges also cautioned that exclusion should not be merely on economic basis (means test or income ceiling), but on the basis of social advancement so as to ensure that the exclusion test does not affect the really backward among the OBCs.
The political chicanery of the Centre in the subsequent years has deprived the really backward OBCs of reservation benefits.
For this, the means test chosen has been precisely what the judiciary has avoided.
The Centre’s justification for its decision of February 4, 2004, to hike the income ceiling for determining the ‘creamy layer’ among the OBCs from Rs. 1 lakh to Rs. 2.5 lakhs a year was that it was in line with the recommendations of the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC). But the NCBC did not have any data to support its recommendations.
In less than five years after the hike in income ceiling and without any evaluation of its impact on the OBCs, the Centre decided on October 4, 2008, to raise the income criterion for the creamy layer from Rs.2.5 lakhs to Rs. 4.5 lakhs a year. The Centre’s argument that this would help in bringing more people under the reservation category and help students seeking admission under the Central Educational Institutions Act, 2006, which provides 27 per cent reservation for the OBCs, is prima facie misleading.
For one thing, there has not been any economic revolution in the country in the last four years that would affect the OBCs as a category and warrant such a huge hike in the income criterion. For another, as OBCs are a disparate socio-economic ensemble, the effects of the factors supposedly taken into consideration by the NCBC need to be assessed in a disaggregated manner.
That takes this write-up to four larger issues which the Centre has all along ignored: (a) losing sight of the rationale for elimination of the creamy layer; (b) use of income ceiling when multiple tests are possible, and use of “non-creamy layer¶ certificate when the “non-creamy layer¶ status should ideally be arrived at through multiple tests; (c) need for addressing the unequal regional effects of reservations; and (d) continuing neglect of the SCs and STs.
Of the first, it was probably Justice V R Krishna Iyer who coined “creamy layer¶ in State of Kerala v. N M Thomas (1976). He observed that the experience of reservation in practice showed that the benefits were snatched away by the top creamy layer of the backward classes, thus keeping the weakest amongst weak always weak and leaving the fortunate layers to consume the whole cake; and that the claim for reservation by the backward class was ‘overplayed extravagantly’ by large and vocal groups whose burden of backwardness had been substantially lightened by the march of time, measures of better education and more opportunities of employment. These observations are more relevant today than in the 1970s.
Related to these observations is the following definition of creamy layer by the Justice R N Prasad Creamy Layer Identification Committee appointed by the Centre following the Supreme Court rulings of November 16, 1992: “The Committee defined the ‘creamy layer’ as when a person has been able to shed off the attributes of social and educational backwardness and has secured employment or has engaged himself in some trade/ profession of high status and at which stage he is normally no longer in need of reservation.¶What the Centre should have addressed and the judiciary should have been convinced about is whether sections of OBCs have shed off the attributes of social and educational backwardness as disabilities of their castes.
The Prasad Committee had given multiple criteria under six broad categories for identifying the creamy layer: Children of: (a) Those who hold constitutional posts; (b) Group A (Class I officers) and Group B (Class II services) including employees holding equivalent posts in PSUs, banks, insurance companies and universities; (c) Officers of the armed forces of the rank of colonel or an equivalent post and above; (d) Professionals and those engaged in trade, business and industry; (e) Property owners such as those who hold irrigated agricultural land equal to or more than 85 per cent of the statutory ceiling area for a particular state; and (f) Those whose annual income is Rs 1 lakh or more.
These criteria are in the nature of multiple tests,which should be part of any application for availing of reservation benefits, and the elimination should take place at the screening stage of applications. As production of “non-creamy layer¶ certificates on the basis of income can be highly misleading, only an income certificate in its place should be used, that too as part of a check list.
Of the third, a uniform income ceiling test for the whole country fails to grapple with regional disparities,whereas multiple tests take care of it. To cite an example, it was learnt from reliable sources in Delhi that in the recent and the first all-India medical admissions on the basis of OBC reservations a majority of the successful candidates were from south India, in particular from one state. Given the wide educational disparities in the country it is only too obvious that OBC students from Orissa or BIMARU states (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh) cannot compete with their counterparts from Kerala or Tamil Nadu on anything like terms of equality.
Of the fourth, while the Supreme Court rulings of November 16, 1992 directed the Union and state governments to have permanent commissions for OBCs, no such direction was issued for SCs and STs.
Releasing a TISS study last month, G K Vasan, Union minister for statistics and programme implementation, said that the disturbing aspect of growth of five per cent in five years in OBC population is that the increase has come about mainly due to local and national political pursuits of adding more castes in the OBC list.
This goes well with the rather cynical observation by one of the NCBC members in a seminar in 2006 that the NCBC’s ambition is to include all castes and communities in the OBC list and declare the entire Indian population as backward!
About the author:
The writer is Professor of Sociology at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai.
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