Reservation is a hard reality, general category should understand it: SC

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court today said reservation in educational institutions and jobs for the backward class is hard reality and students of general category should understand it.

"We know what students (of general category) feel. We understand their blood boils when they see students (of reserved class) having less marks are getting admission but they should know that reservation is the hard reality. They should understand it. We cannot treat unequals as equal," a bench of justices R V Raveendran and A K Patnaik said.

The bench, which made the remarks, referred the matter to Chief Justice of India S H Kapadia for constituting an appropriate bench to sort out the confusion on the use of term cut-off in the law which upheld the 27 per cent quota for OBC in central educational institutions.

The remarks were made by the bench when a lawyer for anti-quota group pleaded that the standard of education will go down if the quota system is implemented blindly without any check on the quality of students admitted in the reserved category.

The court was hearing the issues pertaining to discrepancies in implementation of 27 per cent quota for OBC in central universities, the law for which was upheld by its constitution bench on April 10, 2008.

The two-judge bench was to sort out the confusion on the issue of cut-off marks to be adopted for admission of OBC candidates.

It was dwelling on whether the cut-off marks for OBC should be only 10 per cent less than the marks on which the admission closed for general category candidates or it should not be less than 10 per cent of the eligibility criteria.