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ReservationSeries

Reservation in India

A clause written to last ten years is in its ninety-fourth. This series reads the record from the start: the Poona Pact of 1932, the bargain struck in the Constituent Assembly, the commissions that tried to define backwardness, and the judgment that fixed a ceiling at 50 per cent.

  1. Part 1

    Poona Pact explained: what Ambedkar traded, and the clause that never expired

    The Poona Pact set an expiry date on one of the things it created and none on the other. The primary elections were to end after ten years; the reserved seats were to continue until the communities concerned agreed otherwise. No such agreement is on record, and the clause is now in its 94th year.

    14 September 2026 · 9 min read

  2. Part 2

    Constituent Assembly 1949: why India's minorities gave up reservation

    In the Constituent Assembly's Minorities Committee, the Muslim, Christian and Sikh communities agreed to surrender reservation of seats. On Sardar Patel's account the amendment to end it was moved by a Muslim member, and the committee split 5 to 2 on one member's own uncertain count. What survived was reservation for the Scheduled Castes alone, with 10 years written beside it.

    14 September 2026 · 12 min read

  3. Part 3

    Constituent Assembly 1949: the tribal census dispute behind reserved seats

    Seats were reserved in proportion to population. In the same debate, the member speaking for India's tribal communities told the House the census had been cooked at every count, and in Assam 8 lakh tribals in the tea gardens were counted into the population and out of the reserved seats.

    14 September 2026 · 10 min read

  4. Part 4

    Article 334 explained: how ten years of reserved seats became eighty

    Article 334 reserved seats for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and set them to expire on 26 January 1960. Six amendments then bought exactly 10 more years each. The seventh, in 2019, gave the reserved seats 80 years and gave the Anglo-Indian nominated seats 70, a term that had already been served.

    14 September 2026 · 9 min read

  5. Part 5

    Kalelkar Commission explained: how India first tried to define who is backward

    The Constitution let the State make special provision for backward classes and never said what one was. Ambedkar's answer in the Assembly was that a backward community is one that is backward in the opinion of the government. The first commission's own chairman asked for his report to be rejected, and the 50% ceiling everyone now argues about began as a sentence that said "speaking generally and in a broad way".

    14 September 2026 · 10 min read

  6. Part 6

    Mandal Commission explained: how 11 indicators produced the 27% OBC quota

    A caste scoring 11 points out of 22 was a backward class and a caste scoring 10 was not. The test found 3,743 castes and put them at 52 per cent of India. The Commission then recommended 27 per cent, saying in its own report that it did so in deference to legal limitation, which left the total half a percentage point under the courts' ceiling.

    14 September 2026 · 9 min read

  7. Part 7

    Indra Sawhney case explained: the 50% ceiling, and the creamy layer

    Nine judges upheld the 27% quota, struck down the 10% beside it, and fixed the ceiling at 50 per cent over the objection of some of their own number. In the same judgment they held that no reservation can be made on economic criteria, and ordered an income test to decide who should be excluded.

    14 September 2026 · 9 min read

  8. Part 8

    Reservation in promotion explained: Article 16(4A), and the M. Nagaraj case

    In 1992 the Supreme Court held that reservation stops at the door of a government job and cannot climb the ladder inside it. Parliament wrote the ladder back in four times in six years, once by a clause that took effect six and a half years before it was signed. In 2006 five judges upheld every one of them, and replaced the words in the opinion of the State with a demand for numbers.

    15 September 2026 · 10 min read

  9. Part 9

    Jarnail Singh and B.K. Pavitra explained: the data test for promotion quotas

    A Karnataka law on promotions fell in 2017 because the State had never counted what it was required to count. It constituted a committee and had a report in forty-four days, and won on it. Five years later the Supreme Court held the counting unit itself was the wrong one, and the Union of India, asked about its own establishment, could answer for 44 of about 90 Ministries.

    15 September 2026 · 11 min read

  10. Part 10

    EWS reservation explained: the 103rd Amendment, and the 50% ceiling

    In 1992 nine judges fixed reservation at 50 per cent and held that economic criteria alone cannot decide who is backward. In 2019 Parliament created a 10 per cent quota on economic criteria alone, on top of the 50. In 2022 five judges upheld it, three to two, not by moving the ceiling but by holding it had never applied to this clause. The Chief Justice was in the minority.

    15 September 2026 · 9 min read

  11. Part 11

    EWS eligibility explained: the Rs 8 lakh limit, and who cannot apply

    The Constitution created a reservation for the economically weaker and put no number in it, leaving the line to be notified by the State from time to time. A departmental memorandum set it at Rs 8 lakh a year, with asset bars that exclude a family irrespective of its income. The groups holding most of India's poorest cannot apply at all, because they are covered somewhere else.

    15 September 2026 · 9 min read