Click to play videoNew Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked the Centre to fill all vacant seats in central educational institutions for Other Backward Classes (OBC) with general category students by the end of October.
The order would benefit general category students hoping to get admissions. The court said that allowing vacant quota seats to be carried over to the next year would be a waste of a precious resource.
It also made it clear that the cut-off marks for OBC candidates cannot be lowered beyond 10 per cent from that of general category students.
The court on September 29 had disapproved the Government’s plan to keep vacant for at least three years the seats reserved for backward category students in the state-run higher educational institutions if all such quota seats are not filled.
“Don’t allow the seats to be vacant,” a five-judge constitutional bench, headed by Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan had said.
"You cannot keep the OBC quota seats vacant as per our judgment. You want to keep the vacancy accumulate for three years? We have already clarified in our judgment and said categorically that the unfilled seats must go to general category. Keeping seats vacant will be counter-productive," the bench had said.
The bench was hearing a lawsuit seeking clarification on the court’s April 10 verdict upholding the law for 27 percent quota for OBCs in state-run institutions of higher learning.
The plea sought to know from the apex court whether the seats, reserved for OBC students but left vacant owing to the their paucity, could be allocated to general category students.
It also sought to know whether the cut-off marks for the admission to the OBC students could be relaxed beyond 10 percent of the cut-off marks fixed for general category students.
(With inputs from IANS)
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