Write short note with a sociological perspective: Other Backward Classes. (2013)
The Other Backward Classes are a residual constitutional category. Articles 15(4) and 16(4) permit provision for “socially and educationally backward classes” and Article 340 allows a commission to investigate them, but the Constitution nowhere defines them. The absence of a positive definition is why its criteria have always been contested.
Defining backwardness: a contested history
| Body | Method / finding | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| First Backward Classes Commission, 1953, chair Kaka Kalelkar (report 1955) | Listed 2,399 backward castes | Rejected — no objective test; Kalelkar feared caste criteria would deepen caste consciousness |
| Mandal Commission, 1979, chair B. P. Mandal (report December 1980) | Eleven indicators weighted social (3 points each), educational (2), economic (1); 11 of 22 points meant backward. OBCs estimated at 52% across 3,743 communities | 27% reservation announced August 1990 |
| Indra Sawhney v. Union of India, 16 November 1992, nine judges | Caste may validly identify a backward class | Upheld 27%; capped reservation at 50%; mandated creamy layer exclusion; barred reservation in promotions |
Every attempt to measure backwardness has used caste while denying caste alone is the test.
Caste as class — and the failure to coincide
- M. N. Srinivas‘s dominant caste names groups commanding land, numbers and local power. Many OBCs — Yadavs, Jats, Vokkaligas, Lingayats — are such landholding dominant castes. Their ritual rank is middling; their economic and political rank is not.
- Hence the differentiation Satish Deshpande and Yogendra Yadav pressed in Economic and Political Weekly (2006): “upper” OBCs absorb benefits meant for the Most Backward Classes. The Rohini Commission (constituted October 2017; report submitted 31 July 2023, still unreleased) found under 1% of sub-castes — about 40 of 5,000–6,000 — taking roughly half of central benefits, a fifth of entries none.
- Christophe Jaffrelot (India’s Silent Revolution, 2003) reads the OBC rise as a real transfer of political power in north India even as the economic transfer stayed narrow: political ascent and material backwardness have come apart.
The category today
The creamy layer ceiling is frozen at ₹8 lakh since 2017; the 105th Amendment (2021) restored states’ power over their own lists; the Bihar Caste Survey (2023) counted OBCs at 27.12% and Extremely Backward Classes at 36.01%, together 63.13%; and Census 2027 enumerates caste for the first time since 1931, turning a political estimate into a statistic.
Conclusion
The OBC is not a class in the Marxian or Weberian sense but a politico-administrative aggregation of castes of intermediate ritual rank and wildly unequal material position, held together by a shared claim on the state rather than a shared relation to production. Its sociological interest lies there: it is where caste and class most visibly converge and most visibly fail to coincide.