SC verdict applicable to IIMs, says Arjun Singh

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Keywords: IIT, IIM

New Delhi: A day after the Supreme Court judgement giving a green signal to the Other Backward Caste quotas in educational institutions supported by the Central government, the Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh says the 27 per cent quota is applicable to all the Indian Institutes of Management.

"It will be applicable to all higher institutes including the IIMs. I did discuss the creamy layer issue with the Prime Minister. It will come up in the Cabinet later," Arjun Singh said.

After the SC verdict, there was some confusion on whether the quota would be applicable to IIMs as some lawyers had begun interpreting the judgement as applicable only at the undergraduate level.

The confusion arose because Justice Dalveer Bhandari of the five-member Constitution Bench that gave the verdict, suggested graduation as the benchmark for deciding who is educationally backward.

The observation prompted some legal analysts to say that it meant that graduates are not educationally backward and the quota would not apply to post-graduate institutes.

Justice Arijit Pasayat and CK Thakker had also questioned whether graduates are educationally backward. The other members of the bench were Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan and Justice RV Raveendran.

But the government has said that the verdict only means that the percentage of graduates within a caste should be the basis for deciding whether that community is educationally backward or not.

Meanwhile, the IIMs have deferred releasing the admission list for the 2008 session after the SC verdict.

"We were planning to release the admission list by April 11 but this decision is taken by all institutes together. So I think we have to go back to other institutes and see whether we need to postpone it by a few days to be able to study the judgement. One week delay is not going to jeopardise the start of the programme," IIM-Ahmedabad director Sameer Barua had said on Thursday.

But the IIM-Kolkata Director Shekhar Chowdhary said they don't have any major problems with the SC ruling.

"We started making our own preparations. In a month or two we will be ready with the infrastructure. We have already implemented reservation for SC and ST candidates. So we are ready with the necessary preparations. I personally do not foresee any problem," Chowdhary said.

The IIMs will have to implement the 27 per cent quota in phases over a period of three years and the government has given them a free hand to decide on how many seats they want to reserve in the three phases.

IIM-A has plans to reserve six per cent seats for OBCs in the first year while the total number of seats will be increased by 12 per cent.

Other IIMs also will chart out similar plans to implement the quota in a phased manner.