Centre asks Supreme Court for two years to rewrite OBC creamy-layer rules

The Union government has asked the Supreme Court for two years to write fresh criteria for the Other Backward Classes creamy layer, and has asked that the already finished Civil Services Examination 2025 be kept on the old reading of the rule. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta mentioned the application on Tuesday before a bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant. The Chief Justice said a special bench would be needed because the original judgment, delivered on 11 March by Justices P.S. Narasimha and R. Mahadevan, was given by judges who now sit separately. The applications are listed for 1 September before those two judges.

The March ruling in Union of India versus Rohith Nathan held that creamy-layer status cannot rest on parental income or salary alone. The status and category of the posts the parents hold must also count, including jobs in public sector undertakings and in the private sector. UPSC had declared the 2025 civil services result on 6 March, five days earlier, and recommended 958 candidates. The Department of Personnel and Training says the judgment has thrown doubt over the category of nearly 100 OBC candidates in that batch.

Mehta told the court the government is not seeking a review of the legal principle. It wants a direction that the 2025 process, whose notification went out on 22 January 2025, can be closed under the criteria that were in force while the exam was run. The Centre warns that reopening category lists would delay training, academy calendars, IAS and IPS cadre allocation, seniority and pay fixation for the incoming batch.

The creamy layer is the device that keeps reservation from being captured by the best-off households inside a backward class. For decades the working test has been a parental income ceiling, with exceptions for children of higher constitutional and civil-service post-holders. The March bench said a salary number, by itself, misses people whose parents hold posts that already confer status. That is a coherent principle. It is also a principle that no recruiting body can apply overnight, because it requires a schedule of posts across the public and private sectors and a way to classify them.

Two years is a long administrative pause. It is also a confession that the state does not yet have the schedule the court described. If the special bench grants the pause and shields CSE 2025, the 100 candidates keep their allocation and the next exam cycles wait for a gazette that may slip. If the bench refuses the retrospective shield, DoPT has to re-examine those files against a test it says it cannot yet administer with consistency.

Senior advocate Sanjay Hegde, appearing for a litigant, pointed out the original coram. That is why 1 September matters. The judges who wrote the sentence about parental posts will now say whether they meant it to reach a result that had already been taped to a notice board. Until they speak, the batch of 2025 sits with an offer of appointment in one hand and a category question in the other.