A Tale of Two Supreme Court Rulings on Indian Affirmative Action

Orhan Aygün and Bertan Turhan

ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: India has implemented a complex affirmative action via a reservation system since the 1950s. In the historic case Indra Shawney vs. Union of India (1992), the judgment formulated three principles for reservation policy to respect. In another historic case, Ashoka Kumar Thakur vs. Union of India (2008) (AKT), the Supreme Court of India (SCI) mandated a 27 percent reservation to the Other Backward Classes (OBC). It recommended two directives without defining a procedural framework. The first one suggests implementing the OBC reservation as a soft reserve. The second one advises a maximum of 10 points difference between the cutoff scores of OBC and the open category to maintain the standard of excellence. We show that the two directives in AKT conflict with India's fundamental mandates from Indra Shawney (1992) in the sense that no choice rule can implement them concurrently. The incompatibility is resolved by either dropping the AKT directives on de-reservation or weakening the directive on eligibility. We propose path-independent assignment rules in each case.

Date: 2024-03-06
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