The Patna High Court on Thursday struck down amendments made by the Bihar legislature in November to increase caste-based reservations in education and government jobs from 50% to 65%, reported Bar and Bench.
In November, the Bihar legislature passed a bill to raise the quota slabs. The bill aimed to increase the reservations for Scheduled Castes to 20%, up from 16%. The quota for Scheduled Tribes was to be doubled from 1% to 2%.
It also raised the reservations for the Other Backward Classes to 15% from 12% and for the Extremely Backward Classes to 25% from 18%. Combined with another 10% reservation for the Economically Weaker Sections, the total quota limit in the state would have increased to 75%.
On Tuesday, a bench of Chief Justice K Vinod Chandran and Justice Harish Kumar said that the bill was “infringing upon the right to equality”, reported The Indian Express.
The court was hearing a batch of petitions challenging the bill.
Rakesh Kumar, one of the petitioners, had argued that it was not prudent on the part of the Bihar government to raise the quota limit when the Supreme Court had quashed similar decisions in the past.
The Supreme Court had in 1992 put in place a 50% limit on caste-based reservations.
The bill to raise the quota in Bihar was passed after the state government released the findings of its caste survey on October 2. The state government at the time comprised Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress, among other parties.
The survey showed that the Other Backward Classes and the Extremely Backward Classes constituted more than 63% of the state’s population.
The survey had also found that Bihar’s population was about 13.07 crore. Of this, the Extremely Backward Classes, at 36%, were the largest social segment followed by the Other Backward Classes at 27.13%.
The population of the Scheduled Castes stood at 19.7% and the Scheduled Tribes at 1.7%. Bihar’s general population accounted for the remaining 15.5%.
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