Click to play videoNew Delhi: India is gearing up for the election season with Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh and Jammu and Kashmir going to polls at the end of this year. Lok Sabha elections are scheduled to be held early next year.
Ahead of the elections, the Central Government has decided to extend some more benefit to the Other Backward Castes (OBC).
The Union Cabinet met on Friday and decided to increase the income limit of creamy layer of OBCs from Rs 2.5 lakh to Rs 4.5 lakh per annum.
However, the government's decision goes against a Supreme Court judgment which said that vacant OBC seats in higher education institutes be de-reserved to accommodate general category students.
"Our party has always been of the view that creamy layer should not be excluded for quota benefit," Ram Vilas Paswan, Minister of Chemicals & Fertilizers and Steel and Lok Jan Shakti Party chief, said.
The pro-quota lobby in the United Progressive Alliance had been demanding a lot more than the Supreme Court permitted in its OBC quota judgment.
The judgment insisted that creamy layer be kept out from the purview of the benefit as far as possible but now the quota lobby says that if OBC seats are going vacant, the best way out is not to hand them over to general category students.
They say OBC students with a higher family education can also be considered for admission.
So the Union Cabinet ratified the proposal to enhance the income limit of creamy layer by Rs 2 lakh per annum.
The government in 2004 had fixed the criteria for the creamy layer and last year the Natioanl Commission for Backward Classes was asked by the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment to review this criteria.
The decision assumes significance in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling to de-reserve vacant OBC seats in higher education institutes.
Some allies of the UPA government in south India had been putting pressure on the UPA to bring about the necessary changes in the creamy layer criteria so that more backward candidates could be admitted.
In an election year, it's a move aimed to please the high percentage of the OBC voters all across the country.
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