National Commission for Backward Classes

The National Commission for Backward Classes is the only constitutional body in India charged with administering a category that the Constitution deliberately declined to define. Everything difficult about it follows from that. It advises on who enters and who leaves the central list of socially and educationally backward classes, but it has no authority to say what backwardness is, no machinery of its own to find out, and no power to make anyone accept its answer.

The Constitution’s deliberate silence on who the backward classes are

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• The Constituent Assembly wrote “socially and educationally backward classes” into the text and then refused to say what the phrase meant, leaving identification to future governments and, inevitably, to courts.
  • Article 15(4), added by the First Amendment (1951) after State of Madras v. Champakam Dorairajan struck down communal quotas in education, permits special provision for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes, and for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
  • Article 16(4) permits reservation in appointments for any backward class of citizens not adequately represented in the services of the State — a differently worded category, and the difference has generated litigation ever since.
  • Article 46 places on the State a Directive Principle duty to promote with special care the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections.
• For Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes the Constitution supplied a mechanism: Articles 341 and 342 let the President notify the lists, and only Parliament can alter them. For backward classes it supplied nothing equivalent until 2018.
  • The asymmetry was not oversight. B. R. Ambedkar told the Assembly that “backward classes” was a term nobody could define in advance, and that the working definition would have to be settled administratively, community by community.
  • The consequence is that the SC and ST lists were closed and stable from the beginning, while the backward-class list has been permanently contested, permanently expanding, and permanently political.
• Article 340 was the Assembly’s answer to that gap, and it is the provision from which the entire commission architecture descends.
  • It empowers the President to appoint a Commission to investigate the conditions of the socially and educationally backward classes within the territory of India.
  • The Commission is to investigate the difficulties those classes labour under and to make recommendations on the steps the Union or any State should take to remove those difficulties and improve their condition.
  • Its report must be laid before each House of Parliament together with a memorandum explaining the action taken on it — an accountability loop written into the Constitution itself.
• The crucial feature of Article 340 is that it contemplates an investigative commission of inquiry, not a standing advisory body.
  • It presumes that backwardness is a question of fact capable of expert determination, to be established by evidence about conditions rather than declared by political decision.
  • That premise — investigation before entitlement — is what later critics mean when they call Article 340 the constitutional soul of the backward-classes scheme.

The First Backward Classes Commission and the collapse of the first attempt

• The first commission under Article 340 was appointed on 29 January 1953 under Kaka Kalelkar, a Gandhian and a member of the Constituent Assembly, and it reported on 30 March 1955.
• Its central methodological choice was to treat caste as the unit of backwardness, on the reasoning that in Indian conditions social status and occupation were transmitted by birth.
  • It applied four broad tests: low position in the traditional caste hierarchy, general lack of educational advancement, inadequate or no representation in government service, and inadequate representation in trade, commerce and industry.
  • Working from these, it listed 2,399 castes and communities as backward, a substantial subset of which it marked out as “most backward” — the first official gesture towards what would later be called sub-categorisation.
• Its recommendations were far-reaching and, for the government of the day, unmanageable.
  • Caste-wise enumeration in the 1961 Census, without which no serious identification exercise could be undertaken.
  • Seventy per cent of seats in technical and professional institutions reserved for qualified students of backward classes.
  • Reservation of vacancies in government at 25 per cent in Class I, 33⅓ per cent in Class II and 40 per cent in Classes III and IV.
  • Land reform, and the relating of women’s welfare and rural credit to backward-class advancement.
• The report was destroyed from inside by its own chairman.
  • Kalelkar attached a covering letter repudiating the caste criterion his commission had used, arguing that identifying backwardness by caste would perpetuate the very institution the Constitution sought to dissolve.
  • He proposed instead that backwardness be judged by economic condition, occupation and living standards, and several members recorded dissents of their own.
  • A commission whose chairman disowns its central finding cannot bind a government, and the Union treated the report accordingly.
• The government’s rejection was formal and consequential.
  • The report was placed before Parliament in 1956 with a memorandum stating that the caste-based lists were too vague and too wide to be a workable basis for policy.
  • In 1961 the Union informed the states that it would prepare no central list of backward classes, and left each state free to draw up its own using its own criteria.
• That decision produced the pattern that still shapes the field.
  • States appointed their own backward classes commissions — the Sattanathan Commission in Tamil Nadu, the Havanur and later Venkataswamy and Chinnappa Reddy commissions in Karnataka, and equivalents elsewhere — and built state lists decades before any central list existed.
  • Southern states with strong non-Brahmin movements had substantial backward-class reservation from the 1950s and 1960s; most of the north had almost none until 1990.
  • The federal duality of central and state lists, which the courts would later have to arbitrate, was created here, by a Union refusal to act.

The Mandal Commission and the framework that survived

• The Second Backward Classes Commission was appointed on 1 January 1979 under B. P. Mandal, a former Chief Minister of Bihar, and reported on 31 December 1980.
• Its lasting contribution was methodological: it replaced impressionistic listing with a weighted, indicator-based test that could in principle be applied to any group.
  • Eleven indicators were grouped into three families — social, educational and economic — and scored.
  • Four social indicators carried three points each, three educational indicators carried two points each, and four economic indicators carried one point each, for a total of twenty-two points.
  • A caste scoring eleven or more — half the total — was classified as backward.
• The indicators themselves defined backwardness as measurable deviation from the state average.

• The findings and the recommendation are the numbers the entire later debate turns on.
  • The Commission identified 3,743 castes and communities as backward and estimated them at 52 per cent of the population, extrapolating from the 1931 Census, the last that had enumerated caste comprehensively.
  • Proportionality would have justified a 52 per cent quota; the Commission recommended 27 per cent in central government services and public undertakings, because the existing 22.5 per cent for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and the judicially indicated 50 per cent ceiling left only that much room.
  • The 27 per cent figure is therefore not a measure of need but a residue of a ceiling — a point its critics and its defenders both concede.
• Mandal recommended much more than a quota, and almost none of the rest was implemented.
  • Reservation in promotions, age relaxation, and reservation in admissions to scientific, technical and professional institutions.
  • Structural reform — land reform and tenancy security, financial assistance for backward-class occupations, and a network of vocational training institutes — on the reasoning that reservation in public employment could reach only a sliver of a population that was overwhelmingly rural and self-employed.
  • A permanent machinery at the Centre and in the states to look after backward-class interests, an idea that would resurface as a judicial direction twelve years later.
• The report sat unimplemented for a decade under successive governments.
  • V. P. Singh announced implementation of the 27 per cent reservation on 7 August 1990, and the office memorandum of 13 August 1990 gave it effect.
  • The announcement triggered the anti-Mandal agitations, immediate litigation, and the constitutional case that would define the field.

Indra Sawhney and the constitutional foundation of the Commission

• Indra Sawhney v. Union of India was decided on 16 November 1992 by a nine-judge bench, the largest ever assembled on reservation, by a majority of 6:3. The lead opinion was written by Justice B. P. Jeevan Reddy.
• The Court upheld the 27 per cent reservation for Other Backward Classes in central services, and in doing so settled the legal status of caste as an identifier.
  • It held that a caste can be a class, and that caste may legitimately be the starting point for identifying a backward class, because in Indian society a caste is often already a socially homogeneous group defined by hereditary occupation.
  • It insisted that the identification must ultimately establish social backwardness of the class, not merely the caste label — caste is evidence of backwardness, not a substitute for it.

“A caste is nothing but a social class — a socially homogeneous class. It is also an occupational grouping, with this difference that its membership is hereditary.” — Justice B. P. Jeevan Reddy, Indra Sawhney v. Union of India

• The creamy layer doctrine was the price of the upholding, and it is the single most consequential idea the judgment produced.
  • Members of a backward class who have risen socially and economically far enough to no longer be backward must be excluded from the benefit, because their inclusion defeats the purpose of the classification and violates equality.
  • The Court directed the Union to specify the bases of exclusion within four months, which produced the Ram Nandan Committee, headed by Justice Ram Nandan Prasad, and the office memorandum of 8 September 1993 that still governs.
  • Creamy layer was applied to backward classes only, not at that stage to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
• The Court affirmed a ceiling of 50 per cent on total reservation, with a narrow escape hatch.
  • The ceiling flows from the reading of Article 16(4) as a facet of equality, not an exception to it: reservation is a form of reasonable classification, and a classification that consumes the majority of opportunities ceases to be an exception at all.
  • It may be exceeded only in extraordinary situations, the illustration given being far-flung and remote populations whose conditions differ from the mainstream — a caveat the Court plainly intended to be rare.
  • The carry-forward of unfilled reserved vacancies was permitted, but the total in any single year was capped at 50 per cent.
• Three further holdings shaped what the Commission would later face.
  • Reservation in promotions was held impermissible under Article 16(4), with existing arrangements allowed to run for five years. Parliament reversed this by the 77th Amendment (1995), inserting Article 16(4A).
  • A purely economic criterion was rejected, and the 10 per cent quota for the economically backward among the higher castes created by the office memorandum of 25 September 1991 was struck down — the direct ancestor of the EWS quota that returned by constitutional amendment nearly three decades later.
  • Reservation was held inapplicable to certain super-speciality and high-technical posts, on the strength of Article 335 and the maintenance of administrative efficiency.
• The direction that created the Commission came almost as an aside and has outlasted much of the rest.
  • The Court directed the Union and the states to constitute a permanent body to entertain, examine and recommend the inclusion in and exclusion from the lists of backward classes.
  • It was to hear complaints of over-inclusion — groups on the list that no longer belonged — and of under-inclusion — groups wrongly left off.
  • The Court also contemplated periodic revision of the lists, since backwardness is a condition that groups can leave.
• Read together, these holdings define the Commission’s job and its cage. It exists to police the boundary of a category whose contents the Court refused to fix and whose size the Court capped.

The Commission was born as a remedy for a judgment’s own uncertainty: a permanent body to keep answering a question the nine judges could not close.

The National Commission for Backward Classes Act, 1993

• Parliament enacted the National Commission for Backward Classes Act, 1993 in direct compliance with the Indra Sawhney direction, and the Commission was constituted in August 1993.
• The statute did something the present constitutional scheme does not: it prescribed who the members had to be.
  • The chairperson was to be a serving or retired judge of the Supreme Court or a High Court.
  • One member was to be a social scientist, one a person with special knowledge of matters relating to backward classes, and one an officer of the rank of Secretary to the Government of India as Member-Secretary.
  • This composition is what later critics mean when they say the Commission was designed as an expert body: judicial chairmanship for the evidentiary discipline, social science for the methodology, administrative experience for feasibility.
• Section 9 defined the function narrowly and gave it unusual force.
  • The Commission was to examine requests for inclusion of any class in the central list of backward classes, and hear complaints of over-inclusion or under-inclusion, and tender advice to the Union.
  • Section 9(2) provided that the Commission’s advice shall ordinarily be binding upon the Central Government — a rare statutory formula, stronger than the recommendatory language governing almost every other Indian commission.
  • The government could depart from it, but only for reasons that would survive judicial scrutiny, and in Ram Singh the Supreme Court held that it had not.
• Section 11 required the Union to undertake a revision of the lists every ten years, with a view to excluding classes that had ceased to be backward and including new ones — the statutory expression of the Court’s periodic-revision idea.
• Its working record over twenty-five years was substantial but confined.
  • It processed several thousand requests for inclusion, conducted public hearings across states, and built the case-by-case jurisprudence of the central list.
  • It recommended in 2015 that OBCs be divided into three tiers — extremely backward classes, more backward classes and backward classes — the first authoritative institutional proposal for sub-categorisation, and the direct precursor of the Rohini Commission.
  • It repeatedly pressed for revision of the creamy layer income ceiling and for a caste enumeration to replace the 1931 extrapolation.
• Its structural limits were already visible before 2018.
  • It had no jurisdiction over state lists, no role in grievances about non-implementation of quotas, and no power to inquire into atrocities or service matters affecting backward classes.
  • Backward-class grievances of that kind went to the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, which held the OBC brief under the pre-2018 constitutional scheme and had neither the time nor the expertise for it.
  • It depended entirely on the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment for staff, budget and data.

Constitutional status: the 102nd Amendment and what it changed

• The Constitution (One Hundred and Second Amendment) Act, 2018 was introduced as the 123rd Constitution Amendment Bill in April 2017 and received the President’s assent on 11 August 2018.
  • A separate bill repealing the National Commission for Backward Classes Act, 1993 was passed alongside it, so the statutory commission was abolished and a constitutional one substituted.
  • The political occasion was the demand, pressed for years, that the backward classes have a body of the same constitutional rank as the National Commission for Scheduled Castes under Article 338 and the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes under Article 338A.
• The amendment inserted three provisions.

• The passage of the bill exposed the federal problem that the Supreme Court would later have to resolve.
  • A Rajya Sabha Select Committee examined the bill and its members pressed for an explicit clause protecting the states’ power to maintain their own backward-class lists, since Article 342A as drafted spoke only of the President and Parliament.
  • The Rajya Sabha passed the bill in July 2017 with an amendment to that effect, and the government did not carry it into the final version, which was passed by both Houses in August 2018 without the protection.
  • The government’s assurance on the floor was that state lists were unaffected. The Court in 2021 would hold that the text said otherwise, and Parliament would then have to legislate the assurance into the Constitution.
• The gains from constitutional status are real but narrower than the rhetoric suggested.
  • The Commission’s existence and core duties can no longer be altered by an ordinary law; abolishing or reshaping it needs a constitutional amendment.
  • Its jurisdiction expanded from advice on lists to the full grievance and monitoring mandate that the SC and ST commissions carry, including inquiry into complaints of deprivation of rights.
  • It acquired civil court powers and a constitutional entitlement to be consulted on all major policy matters affecting backward classes.
• The losses are equally real and are the substance of the criticism.
  • The expert-composition requirement of the 1993 Act vanished. Article 338B says nothing about who may be appointed; the qualifications of judge, social scientist and specialist were repealed with the statute and not replaced.
  • Section 9(2)’s “ordinarily binding” advice vanished with it. Article 338B(9) requires consultation, which is a far weaker obligation than a presumption of bindingness that a court can enforce.
  • Section 11’s ten-yearly revision requirement vanished. Article 338B(5) lists six duties and says nothing about periodic revision of the lists, even though periodic revision was part of what Indra Sawhney asked for.
  • The Commission was left with the old generic name and no textual link to Article 340, the investigative provision under which backward-class commissions had always been appointed and from which the enterprise drew its evidentiary logic.

The Commission gained permanence and lost precision: it is harder to abolish and easier to ignore than the statutory body it replaced.

Composition, appointment and tenure

• Article 338B(2) provides for a Chairperson, a Vice-Chairperson and three other Members — a five-member body, the same size as the SC and ST commissions.
• Appointment is by the President by warrant under his hand and seal, which in practice means appointment by the Union government, since the President acts on ministerial advice.
  • There is no selection committee, no requirement of consultation with the Opposition, and no prescribed qualification for any of the five posts.
  • Article 338B(3) leaves the conditions of service and tenure of office of all members to be determined by rules made by the President, so the terms of appointment are set by executive rule rather than by statute or by the Constitution.
  • Under those rules the term is three years, and no person may hold office for more than two terms.
• The contrast with bodies designed for independence is instructive.
  • The Comptroller and Auditor General and members of the Union Public Service Commission are removable only as a Supreme Court judge is; the NCBC’s members enjoy no such protection, and what executive rule fixes executive rule can alter.
  • The Election Commission acquired a statutory selection committee in 2023; the NCBC has none.
• The appointment record has been political, and the vacancy record poor.
  • Hansraj Gangaram Ahir, a former Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, assumed charge as Chairperson on 2 December 2022.
  • Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, a former Union Minister of State and a member of the Nishad community, took charge as Chairperson on 18 March 2026, with Kiran Umesh Mahalle joining as a Member on 20 March 2026. The chairperson’s office had been vacant for several months before the appointment.
  • Both appointments were read in political commentary as outreach to non-dominant backward-class constituencies rather than as expert selections, which is the predictable consequence of a scheme that prescribes no expertise.
• The result is a body whose composition is determined by the political needs of the government it is meant to advise.

Duties, powers and the reporting chain under Article 338B

• Article 338B(5) lists six duties, and they are worded identically to those of the SC and ST commissions.
  • To investigate and monitor all matters relating to the safeguards provided for the socially and educationally backward classes under the Constitution, under any law in force, or under any government order, and to evaluate the working of those safeguards.
  • To inquire into specific complaints with respect to the deprivation of rights and safeguards of the socially and educationally backward classes.
  • To participate in and advise on the planning process of socio-economic development of those classes, and to evaluate the progress of their development under the Union and any State.
  • To present reports to the President on the working of those safeguards, annually and at such other times as the Commission may deem fit.
  • To make in those reports recommendations on the measures the Union or any State should take for the effective implementation of the safeguards and for the protection, welfare and socio-economic development of those classes.
  • To discharge such other functions in relation to protection, welfare, development and advancement of those classes as the President may by rule specify, subject to any law made by Parliament.
• The reporting chain is the Commission’s principal formal lever, and it is a weak one.
  • Under Article 338B(6) the President must lay the report before each House of Parliament, together with a memorandum explaining the action taken on the recommendations and, crucially, the reasons for non-acceptance of any of them.
  • Under Article 338B(7), where a report concerns a state, a copy goes to the Governor, who lays it before the state legislature with the same memorandum.
  • The obligation is to explain refusal, not to comply with the recommendation. The design assumes that a government forced to state its reasons in public will find refusal costly.
  • In practice, across this entire family of commissions, the tabling of annual reports runs years behind and the action-taken memoranda are formulaic, which drains the mechanism of the publicity that was supposed to make it work.
• Article 338B(8) vests the Commission, while investigating any matter or inquiring into any complaint, with all the powers of a civil court trying a suit, and specifies six.
  • Summoning and enforcing the attendance of any person from any part of India and examining him on oath.
  • Requiring the discovery and production of any document.
  • Receiving evidence on affidavits.
  • Requisitioning any public record or copy of it from any court or office.
  • Issuing summons for examination of witnesses and documents.
  • Any other matter which the President may determine.
• The Commission also has the power to regulate its own procedure, which lets it decide how it hears claims, what evidence it requires and how it conducts field inquiries — the one area of genuine institutional autonomy it possesses.
• Article 338B(9) imposes the consultation duty: the Union and every State Government shall consult the Commission on all major policy matters affecting the socially and educationally backward classes.
  • This is what makes the Commission part of the policy process rather than an auditor of it after the event, and the 105th Amendment (2021) narrowed it by exempting a state preparing its own list.
  • “Major policy matters” is undefined, nothing records whether consultation happened, and there is no consequence for failing to consult — the drafting weakness that has neutered the identical clauses in Articles 338(9) and 338A(9).
• Two structural absences complete the picture.
  • The Commission has no independent investigative machinery — no cadre of investigators, no field survey capacity, no statistical wing. It works from material supplied by the very ministries and state governments whose conduct it is evaluating.
  • It has no power to enforce anything. Civil court powers govern how it gathers evidence; they do not make its conclusions binding on anyone.

Article 342A and the mechanics of the central list

• Article 342A(1) gives the President the power to specify, by public notification and after consultation with the Governor where a state is concerned, the socially and educationally backward classes deemed to be such for the purposes of the Central Government.
• Article 342A(2) provides that the Central List may be altered — by inclusion or exclusion of any class — only by a law made by Parliament.
  • Before 2018 the Commission tendered advice that was ordinarily binding and the government amended the list by executive notification; the same outcome now requires a statute.
  • Defended as a safeguard against arbitrary political inclusion, its effect has been to move the decision further from the Commission and closer to the floor of Parliament, where numbers rather than evidence decide.
• The Commission’s role in the list is therefore entirely upstream and entirely advisory.
  • It receives representations from communities and state governments, holds hearings, calls for socio-economic data, and forms a view.
  • Its view then enters a political pipeline it does not control and cannot compel to move.
• The central list is not the only list, and the difference matters constantly.
  • The Central List governs central government jobs, central educational institutions and central schemes.
  • Each state maintains its own list for state jobs and state institutions, and the two frequently diverge — a community may be backward in one and not in the other, or backward in a state list and absent from the central list for that state.
  • Litigants and applicants encounter this as the recurring problem of a caste certificate valid in one jurisdiction and worthless in another.
• Entry on the list confers eligibility, not benefit. The creamy layer test then filters individuals out of a class that has been admitted.

The Maratha case and the fight over who identifies backward classes

• Jaishri Laxmanrao Patil v. Chief Minister was decided on 5 May 2021 by a five-judge bench — Justices Ashok Bhushan, L. Nageswara Rao, S. Abdul Nazeer, Hemant Gupta and S. Ravindra Bhat — and it reordered the whole scheme.
• The immediate subject was the Maharashtra Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Act, 2018, which reserved seats and posts for the Maratha community over and above the existing 50 per cent.
  • The Act rested on the report of the Maharashtra State Backward Class Commission under Justice M. G. Gaikwad, which had found the Marathas socially and educationally backward.
  • The Bombay High Court had upheld the Act while reducing the quantum; the Supreme Court struck it down in full.
• The bench was unanimous on the substantive reservation questions.
  • The Gaikwad Commission’s findings did not establish an extraordinary situation of the kind Indra Sawhney required before the 50 per cent ceiling could be crossed.
  • The Court declined to refer Indra Sawhney to a larger bench for reconsideration of the ceiling, holding that the rule had governed for nearly three decades and had become settled.
  • Marathas were held to be a politically and socially dominant community in Maharashtra, not a backward class, and the exceptional-circumstances argument amounted to a claim of numbers rather than of deprivation.
• The bench split 3:2 on the effect of the 102nd Amendment, and that is where the Commission’s position was transformed.
  • Justices Bhat, Nazeer and Hemant Gupta held that, read literally, Articles 342A and 366(26C) left the identification of socially and educationally backward classes to the President and Parliament alone, so states could recommend but no longer identify their own backward classes.
  • Justices Bhushan and Nageswara Rao dissented, holding that the amendment concerned only the central list and that the states’ power to maintain lists for their own purposes survived.
  • The majority reading meant that every state list in the country was constitutionally exposed, and that a state wanting to add a community would have to persuade the Union.
• The Constitution (One Hundred and Fifth Amendment) Act, 2021 reversed the reading within three months.
  • Introduced as the 127th Constitution Amendment Bill, it passed the Lok Sabha on 10 August 2021 and the Rajya Sabha on 11 August 2021, both effectively without opposition, and received assent on 18 August 2021.
  • It inserted Article 342A(3), providing that notwithstanding anything in clauses (1) and (2), every State and Union territory may by law prepare and maintain its own list of socially and educationally backward classes, which may differ from the Central List.
  • It clarified Article 366(26C) so that the constitutional definition applies to central and state lists in their respective domains.
  • It added a proviso to Article 338B(9) exempting the preparation of a state list from the duty to consult the Commission.
• The net effect for the NCBC is a loss of reach dressed as a federal restoration.
  • The 105th Amendment restored state autonomy, which was necessary and right, but it did so by expressly removing the Commission from the state list process.
  • The Commission’s jurisdiction is therefore confined to the Central List, which covers a small fraction of the jobs, seats and schemes that OBC status actually opens.
  • Most of the pressure to include, exclude or sub-categorise operates on state lists, precisely where the constitutional body has no locus at all.

Federalism was repaired at the Commission’s expense: the states got their lists back and the Commission was written out of them.

The creamy layer and the boundary of the beneficiary class

• The creamy layer is the mechanism by which a class-based entitlement is prevented from becoming a hereditary privilege, and it is the sharpest test of whether the identification system works.
• The office memorandum of 8 September 1993, following the Ram Nandan Committee, set out the exclusions in categories rather than by income alone.
  • Constitutional posts — children of the President, judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts, and holders of other constitutional offices.
  • Service category — children of Group A or Class I officers of the Union and states, of Group B officers where both parents qualify, of equivalent officers in public sector undertakings, and of armed forces officers of the rank of Colonel and above and equivalents.
  • Professional and trade category — children of doctors, lawyers, chartered accountants, engineers, authors, film artists, sportspersons and traders whose income crosses the ceiling.
  • Property category — holders of agricultural land above the ceiling area, and owners of substantial plantations or vacant urban land and buildings.
  • Income and wealth category — those whose gross annual income exceeds the prescribed limit for three consecutive years, or who hold wealth above the exemption limit under the wealth tax.
• The income ceiling has been revised five times, and not for nearly a decade.

• The stagnation since 2017 is now the loudest live grievance in OBC policy.
  • The convention had been revision roughly every three years to track inflation and revisions of pay; the ceiling has instead been frozen for over eight years.
  • Answering in the Rajya Sabha on 4 February 2026, the government stated that there was no proposal for further revision of the income limit.
  • The Commission itself has pressed for a substantial increase, and a proposal to raise it further has been reported as under consideration and then deferred more than once — an illustration of how little the Commission’s recommendation moves the Union.
  • Because the same Rs 8 lakh figure is also the eligibility ceiling for the EWS quota, whose beneficiaries face no equivalent status-based exclusions, the OBC ceiling has become an argument about unequal treatment as well as about indexation.
• The salary and agricultural income controversy is the other unresolved question.
  • The 1993 memorandum and subsequent clarifications provide that income from salaries and from agricultural land is not counted in computing the Rs 8 lakh, which was intended to protect salaried families of modest rank and cultivators.
  • Departments have repeatedly applied the rule inconsistently, counting salary in some recruitments and not in others, so identically placed candidates have been treated differently.
  • The effect of excluding salary is that the service category carries almost the entire burden of excluding public employees, while a high-earning private-sector household with agricultural land can remain within the non-creamy layer.
• Jarnail Singh v. Lachhmi Narain Gupta extended the principle beyond backward classes.
  • In 2018 a five-judge bench held that the requirement in M. Nagaraj (2006) that states collect quantifiable data on the backwardness of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes before reserving in promotions was contrary to Indra Sawhney and invalid, since SC and ST backwardness is constitutionally presumed.
  • The same bench held that the creamy layer principle applies to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in promotions, so that the more advanced within those groups may be excluded — a significant doctrinal extension of a rule devised for OBCs.
  • In January 2022 a three-judge bench held that no yardstick could be laid down for measuring inadequacy of representation, that the unit for collecting data is the cadre and not the service or group, that population proportion is not the test, and that the data must be reviewed at reasonable intervals fixed by government.
• The unfinished business is that no institution has been given the job of keeping the creamy layer current. The Commission can recommend; the Union revises when it chooses.

Sub-categorisation and the Rohini Commission

• Sub-categorisation is the proposition that the 27 per cent quota should itself be divided, so that the least advanced communities within the backward classes are not competing with the most advanced.
  • It rests on the observation that the OBC category is internally more unequal than the population it is carved out of, containing landed cultivating castes and landless artisanal and service castes in the same legal box.
  • The NCBC recommended a three-tier division in 2015 — extremely backward, more backward and backward — and the Union did not act on it.
• The Commission to Examine Sub-Categorisation of Other Backward Classes, chaired by Justice G. Rohini, former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, was constituted under Article 340 on 2 October 2017.
  • Its terms of reference were to examine the extent of inequitable distribution of reservation benefits among OBC castes; to work out a scientific mechanism and parameters for sub-categorisation; to classify the castes in the Central List into sub-categories; and to correct errors of spelling, transcription and duplication in the list.
  • The fourth term is not clerical housekeeping: the central list had accumulated repetitions and variant spellings that made it impossible to know how many communities it actually contained.
• Its diagnostic findings, drawn from an analysis of central recruitments and admissions, are the most authoritative evidence available on how the quota actually distributes.
  • Ninety-seven per cent of reserved jobs and educational seats had gone to just 25 per cent of OBC sub-castes.
  • A quarter of all such jobs and seats — 24.95 per cent — had gone to only ten communities.
  • 983 communities, some 37 per cent of the roughly 2,600 in the Central List, had zero representation in central jobs and institutions.
  • 994 sub-castes together accounted for a total representation of 2.68 per cent.
• The Commission received repeated extensions — more than a dozen over almost six years — and submitted its report to President Droupadi Murmu on 31 July 2023.
  • The report has not been made public, has not been tabled, and no action has been taken on it.
  • Reported drafts proposed splitting the 27 per cent into bands weighted towards communities with little or no existing representation, but no official version of the classification exists in the public domain.
• The constitutional obstacle to sub-categorisation has since been removed.
  • In State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (1 August 2024) a seven-judge bench, by 6:1, held that sub-classification within the Scheduled Castes is constitutionally permissible, overruling E. V. Chinnaiah (2005), which had treated a notified list as a homogeneous class incapable of further division.
  • The reasoning — that a notified group is not thereby proved internally uniform, and that graded backwardness within it may be addressed on quantifiable evidence — applies with even greater force to a backward-class list assembled from thousands of communities.
• States had run ahead of the Centre for decades.
  • Tamil Nadu has maintained a separate Most Backward Classes quota since 1989; Bihar has an Extremely Backward Classes category; Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, West Bengal, Jharkhand and Maharashtra all operate internal divisions of their backward-class quotas.
  • Sub-categorisation without data invites its own litigation: Tamil Nadu’s 10.5 per cent internal quota for Vanniyars was struck down in 2022 for want of contemporaneous quantifiable data justifying the separate treatment.
• The Rohini episode is the clearest single illustration of the Commission’s position. The evidence establishing that the quota is captured is now official; the body constitutionally charged with backward-class policy neither commissioned it, holds it, nor can compel its release.

The state now knows precisely which communities the quota never reaches, and has published nothing and changed nothing.

The fifty per cent ceiling under pressure

• The Constitution (One Hundred and Third Amendment) Act, 2019 inserted Articles 15(6) and 16(6), permitting up to 10 per cent reservation for the economically weaker sections among citizens not already covered by the SC, ST and OBC reservations.
  • This revived precisely the criterion Indra Sawhney had rejected in 1992, and did so by constitutional amendment rather than executive memorandum, placing it beyond the reach of that holding.
  • Because the EWS quota sits on top of the existing 49.5 per cent, total reservation at the Centre now stands at 59.5 per cent.
• Janhit Abhiyan v. Union of India(7 November 2022) upheld the amendment by 3:2 before a bench of Chief Justice U. U. Lalit and Justices Dinesh Maheshwari, S. Ravindra Bhat, Bela M. Trivedi and J. B. Pardiwala.
  • The majority held that reservation on a purely economic criterion does not violate the basic structure, and that excluding SCs, STs and OBCs from the EWS quota is a reasonable classification because those groups already have reservation of their own.
  • On the ceiling, the majority held that the 50 per cent limit is not inflexible and in any case does not constrain a reservation made outside Articles 15(4) and 16(4).
  • Justice Bhat, with Chief Justice Lalit concurring, dissented: poverty is not confined to the forward castes, and excluding the poorest members of the most disadvantaged groups from a poverty-based benefit inverts the logic of Article 14.
• The practical effect is that the ceiling now binds caste-based reservation and nothing else.
  • A quota for the poor among the advantaged may exceed it; a quota for a backward class may not.
  • The asymmetry is what makes every subsequent state attempt to breach the ceiling politically irresistible and legally hopeless.
• Bihar produced the most instructive test.
  • The Bihar caste survey, conducted between January and August 2023, found Extremely Backward Classes at 36.01 per cent, Other Backward Classes at 27.12 per cent — together 63.13 per cent — Scheduled Castes at 19.65 per cent, Scheduled Tribes at 1.68 per cent, and the unreserved at 15.52 per cent.
  • On 9 November 2023 the state enacted two amendment acts raising reservation from 50 to 65 per cent, which with the EWS quota took the total to 75 per cent.
  • The Patna High Court struck both down on 20 June 2024, holding that the state had shown proportional population but not inadequacy of representation.
  • Backward communities in fact held 68.52 per cent of state government posts, and the ceiling was held mandatory absent extraordinary circumstances. The Supreme Court declined to stay that ruling.
• Tamil Nadu remains the standing exception, with 69 per cent reservation preserved by placing the enabling Act in the Ninth Schedule in 1994.
  • After I. R. Coelho (2007), Ninth Schedule laws inserted after 24 April 1973 remain open to basic-structure review, so the protection is less absolute than it appears; the challenge has nonetheless remained unresolved for decades.
• For the Commission the ceiling is the binding constraint on its advisory work. Because the reserved share is fixed, every recommendation to include a community is arithmetically a recommendation to dilute the share of those already inside, which converts an evidentiary question into a zero-sum political contest.

The claim to backwardness from dominant communities

• The most persistent pressure on the Commission now comes not from the excluded but from landowning, numerically strong and politically dominant peasant castes demanding entry into the backward-class category.
  • Jats in Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and adjoining states; Patidars or Patels in Gujarat; Marathas in Maharashtra; Kapus in Andhra Pradesh; and Gujjars in Rajasthan seeking a still more protected sub-category.
  • These are, in M. N. Srinivas’s sense, dominant castes — commanding land, local political office and ritual standing sufficient to control a locality — which is the opposite of the condition the category was designed for.
• Ram Singh v. Union of India(17 March 2015) is the decisive judicial answer and the strongest moment in the Commission’s own record.
  • The Union had included Jats in the Central List for nine states by a notification of 2 March 2014, on the eve of a general election, against the express advice of the NCBC, which had examined fresh survey data and found them not socially backward.
  • The Court quashed the notification, holding that Section 9(2) of the 1993 Act made the Commission’s advice ordinarily binding, that departure required strong and compelling reasons recorded in writing, and that the government had relied on outdated state-level material rather than confronting the Commission’s findings.
  • The Court warned against treating political mobilisation as evidence of backwardness, since a group’s capacity to agitate is generally a mark of the influence it claims to lack.
  • It also insisted that the beneficiary class must be continuously reassessed rather than inherited.

“Backwardness is a manifestation caused by the presence of several independent circumstances which may be social, cultural, economic, educational or even political.” — Supreme Court, Ram Singh v. Union of India

• The Court went further and questioned whether a caste-centred method can identify tomorrow’s backward classes at all.

“New practices, methods and yardsticks have to be continuously evolved moving away from caste centric definition.” — Supreme Court, Ram Singh v. Union of India

• It pointed towards groups such a method never sees, citing the recognition of the transgender community in NALSA (2014) as a socially and educationally backward class as a development too significant to ignore.
• The scholarly explanation of these agitations is agrarian rather than social.
  • Small and marginal holdings, stagnant farm incomes, indebtedness and the collapse of agriculture’s capacity to absorb a young and increasingly educated generation have made public employment the only visible ladder in regions where private formal-sector jobs are scarce.
  • Christophe Jaffrelot reads it as a symptom of the incompleteness of the silent revolution: the peasant castes captured political power without a corresponding transformation of the economy, and now seek through quotas what growth did not deliver.
  • The demands intensify in periods of rural distress and subside when farm prices recover, which is not the behaviour of a claim about hereditary social disability.
• Structurally, these are the claims the Commission is least able to resist.
  • It cannot define backwardness, so it can only apply criteria set elsewhere to data supplied by others.
  • It has no survey capacity of its own to rebut a state commission’s finding, as the Gaikwad and Jat episodes showed.
  • Since 2021 it has no locus at all in state lists, where these agitations are usually directed — Maharashtra’s response to the Manoj Jarange agitation was to issue Kunbi caste certificates to Marathas under state authority, an administrative route around the whole identification apparatus.
  • Its members are appointed by the government facing the agitation, on terms that government sets.

Data: the caste census and the 1931 problem

• Every quantitative claim in Indian backward-class policy rests on an extrapolation from the Census of 1931, the last that enumerated caste comprehensively; caste other than SC and ST has not been counted since.
  • The Mandal figure of 52 per cent was derived from that base, and it has been contested from the day it was published without any means of settling the dispute.
  • The Socio-Economic and Caste Census of 2011 did collect caste, but the enumeration returned an unmanageable number of distinct caste names, many of them variant spellings, sub-caste names, gotras and surnames, and the caste data was never released in usable form.
• The next Census, scheduled for 2027, will enumerate caste — the first comprehensive caste count in nearly a century.
• For the Commission’s actual work, reliable caste data changes what is possible.
  • Identification could rest on measured social and educational indicators for a named community rather than on representations and affidavits.
  • Exclusion becomes practicable: a group that has ceased to be backward can be shown to have ceased, which is the harder half of Indra Sawhney‘s mandate and the half never performed.
  • Sub-categorisation requires knowing which communities inside the category actually access the quota, which is exactly what the Rohini findings measured indirectly and a census could measure directly.
  • Reservation in promotions already requires cadre-wise quantifiable data under Nagaraj and Jarnail Singh, which cannot be generated from a 1931 baseline.
• The risks are equally concrete: enumeration gives caste official statistical existence, converts every count into a claim for proportional share, and will generate immediate pressure on the 50 per cent ceiling. Data settles who is where; it does not settle what follows from that.

The record, and the gap between the design and the practice

• What the Commission has demonstrably done since 1993 is narrow, technical and real.
  • It has examined several thousand requests for inclusion in the Central List, held public hearings in the states, and given the list whatever internal coherence it has.
  • It resisted the inclusion of the Jats in 2014 on the evidence, and was vindicated by the Supreme Court a year later — the clearest instance of an Indian commission’s advice overriding an election-eve political decision.
  • It recommended three-tier sub-categorisation in 2015, ahead of the government’s own commission, and has pressed repeatedly for revision of the creamy layer ceiling and for caste enumeration.
  • Since 2018 it has used its wider mandate to summon state officials over grievances about OBC scholarship arrears, non-filling of backlog vacancies, hostel provision and admission irregularities.
• The design-and-practice gap is not a story of neglect but of powers deliberately withheld.
• Five structural criticisms recur, and each names a specific omission rather than a general failing.
  • The new Commission still does not amount to a credible and effective social-justice architecture: it monitors safeguards it cannot enforce, using data it does not generate.
  • Because it has no responsibility to define backwardness, it cannot answer the demands of castes seeking inclusion; it can only measure them against criteria fixed elsewhere.
  • By retaining the old generic name and delinking the body from Article 340, its constitutional soul, the reform detached the scheme of special protections from the investigative logic that justified it.
  • The features of an expert body that the Supreme Court had contemplated — judicial chairmanship, social-science membership, specialist knowledge — are absent from the new composition.
  • Article 338B(5) is silent on the periodic revision of the backward-class list in consultation with the Commission, although periodic revision was central to what Indra Sawhney directed.
• And constitutional status plus further statutes will not by themselves change conditions at the grassroots, where access to schooling, land and credit determines whether a listed community can use the entitlement at all.

How scholarship reads the enterprise

• Marc Galanter framed India’s system as compensatory discrimination and identified the problem the Commission exists to manage: benefits flow to the most capable members of the beneficiary class, so a group-based remedy tends to build a stratum that reproduces its own advantage.
  • He distinguished the distributive effect of preference — who gets the job — from its expressive effect on how the society regards the group, and argued the second is often larger and less measurable.
  • His central worry was the absence of an exit rule: a system with no mechanism for removing groups that no longer need it converts a remedy into a permanent status.
• Andre Beteille argued that Indian inequality had shifted from a harmonic system, where hierarchy was justified by shared belief, to a disharmonic one where inequality persists against a professed ideology of equality — and that caste-based reservation in a disharmonic order risks entrenching what it was meant to dissolve.
  • He objected that reservation creates a vested interest in backwardness, giving communities a material reason to claim and retain a low status.
  • He resigned from the National Knowledge Commission in 2006 over the extension of OBC reservation to higher education, on the argument that institutions of learning are constituted differently from arms of the state.
• Christophe Jaffrelot described the political ascent of the OBCs in north India as a silent revolution — a transfer of legislative and party power to the lower castes, achieved without violence and largely without redistribution of land or capital.
• Yogendra Yadav named the corresponding electoral change the second democratic upsurge: from the late 1980s, turnout and participation among OBCs, Dalits and rural voters rose above that of the privileged, inverting the pattern of most democracies.
• Satish Deshpande supplies the mirror argument in his account of castelessness: the upper castes present themselves as the caste-free “general” category, so caste appears to be a property only of those who are disadvantaged by it, and caste privilege becomes statistically and morally invisible.
• Ashwini Deshpande’s empirical work finds no support for the claim that quotas have damaged administrative efficiency, and locates their real limitation elsewhere: reservation touches only the organised public sector, a small fraction of employment, so it cannot by itself alter the distribution of opportunity.

The reform agenda

• The Second Administrative Reforms Commission, in Citizen Centric Governance, argued that the effectiveness of these commissions depends on the extent to which government gives effect to their recommendations, so that political will, not additional statutory text, is the operative variable. Its proposals were structural.
  • Merge the several rights and equality commissions under the NHRC to end overlapping jurisdictions and inter-commission conflict.
  • Establish a standing committee of Parliament to exercise continuous oversight and enforce accountability.
  • Provide greater devolution of powers, including financial devolution, since the volume of complaints these bodies receive already exceeds what their budgets and staff can handle — and that volume is itself evidence that people expect something of them.
  • Make composition and funding independent of government, without which a watchdog cannot function as one.
  • Make recommendations mandatory rather than advisory.
  • Require consultative mechanisms with civil society organisations rather than leaving engagement to discretion.
• Reforms specific to the NCBC follow from the omissions in Article 338B.
  • Prescribe qualifications by law — judicial chairmanship, social-science and specialist membership — restoring the expert character the 1993 Act had and the amendment removed.
  • Restore a presumption that its advice on inclusion and exclusion binds the government, subject to reasons recorded in writing, as Section 9(2) provided.
  • Mandate periodic revision of the Central List at a fixed interval, giving Article 338B(5) the content Section 11 once supplied.
  • Give it a permanent research and survey wing so that it can generate evidence instead of receiving it.
  • Publish the Rohini Commission report and act on sub-categorisation, for which Davinder Singh has cleared the constitutional path.
  • Index the creamy layer ceiling to a published price or pay index so that revision ceases to be an annual political decision.
  • Restore an explicit link to Article 340, so that inclusion once again presupposes investigation.

Conclusion

The National Commission for Backward Classes is constitutionally secure and functionally slight. It cannot define backwardness, cannot investigate independently, cannot compel a government to accept its advice, cannot reach the state lists where most of the pressure falls, and cannot force the publication of the one report that establishes how badly the quota is distributed.

• Its powers of inquiry are genuine and its powers of consequence are not, and that asymmetry was chosen in 2018 rather than inherited.
• The category it administers is contested from both directions at once — by dominant peasant castes seeking entry and by 983 listed communities that have never received anything — and it has no independent means of adjudicating either claim.
• The 2027 caste enumeration will give it, for the first time since 1931, evidence adequate to its mandate. Whether that produces better identification or only a sharper contest over shares depends on powers the Commission does not currently have.
• Constitutional status settled the question of whether the backward classes deserve a permanent body. It left open the older question, which the Constituent Assembly declined to answer and no institution has answered since: who the backward classes are, and how anyone would know when they have ceased to be.