NEW DELHI: Seeking two years to frame creamy layer criteria for OBCs, Centre Tuesday requested Supreme Court for an early hearing on its application against retrospective implementation of SC’s March 11 judgement, which disallowed this classification of OBC candidates based on the salaries of parents employed in PSUs or the private sector.Solicitor general Tushar Mehta requested a bench led by CJI Surya Kant to list the application seeking certain clarifications on the March 11 judgement in the Rohit Nathan case. This was opposed by advocate Varun Thakur, who said the law was settled by SC.The SG said Centre was not seeking review or modification of the judgement but wanted to apprise the court of field-level difficulties in retrospective implementation. The SG said this would require changing the status of older batches of creamy layer OBC candidates to non-creamy and warrant change in cadre, post and service in civil services. It would also necessitate corresponding changes for an equal number of candidates who had long been serving in a cadre and service like IFS, IAS and IPS, and result in chaos.Mehta said he was only requesting early listing before a bench of Justices P S Narasimha and R Mahadevan. CJI agreed to list the applications on Sept 1.In its application, Centre said, “On account of the serious challenges and implications with the implementation of the directions of SC, govt is committed to bring out a policy which will effectively address the observations made by SC, while also ensuring that the direct and indirect impact of the policy is fair and just.”If the March 11 judgement is implemented without suitable policy intervention it will have a far-reaching impact on govt recruitments and admissions in higher education institutions undertaken by central as well as 18 state/UT govts, it said.Govt said major bodies/employers — like Railways, banks, the department of posts and paramilitary — would also be flooded with hundreds of thousands of representations/litigations seeking retrospective reclassification of the creamy layer.
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Following the Indra Sawhney judgement in 1992, govt had issued an office memorandum on Sept 8, 1993, prescribing the criteria for identifying the OBC creamy layer who would be excluded from reservation benefits.In its March 11 judgement, SC had also observed that the determination of the creamy layer status must be based on the occupational categories specified in the 1993 office memorandum and the income of parents employed in private sector organisations could not automatically lead to the conclusion that the candidate belonged to the creamy layer.
