Thaindian News

New Delhi, July 1 (IANS) Declining to give any immediate direction, the Supreme Court Friday posted for Monday a plea seeking uniformity in the admission criteria for students from Other Backward Classes (OBCs) seeking admission to central universities, including Delhi University and the Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The petition sought a stay of the Delhi High Court order of Sep 7 last year which had said that the minimum eligibility criteria for admission under OBC category would be at a maximum 10 percent below the minimum eligibility criteria fixed for the General category.

An apex court vacation bench of Justice P. Sathasivam and Justice A.K. Patnaik declined to hear the application and said it should be placed before the regular bench that had issued notice in the matter. The notice on the petition by P.V. Indiresan, challenging the single judge Delhi High Court order, was issued on Sep 27, 2010.

The application will now come up for hearing before the bench headed by Justice R.V. Raveendran. The issue before the bench is whether the cut-off marks for the OBC students should get the weightage of 10 percent compared to cut-off marks fixed for the general category candidates or should it be 10 percent less than the minimum eligibility criteria.

The petition contended that the high court order is in contravention of the Supreme Court’s constitution bench judgment which said that OBC students shall get ten percent weightage as compared to the minimum eligibility percentage prescribed for General category students.

The petitioner P.V.Indiresan - a former professor of IIT, Madras - has contended that both Delhi University and JNU are misinterpreting the apex court verdict. Indiresan is seeking the implementation of the April 10, 2008 apex court verdict by which it upheld the constitutional validity of the 27 percent reservation for the OBC students in central educational Institutions.

Appearing for the petitioner, senior counsel Indu Malhotra told the court that both the Delhi University and the JNU were following different criterion for admitting students under OBC reserved category.

The petitioner said that if the impugned judgment of the Delhi High Court delivered by the single judge was not stayed then the petition would become infructuous as far as the current academic year was concerned.

Because of discrepancies in the implementation of the OBC reservation in admission, a large number of OBC students are being denied admission even though a large number of seats reserved for them are lying vacant, they said.

In the meanwhile, Delhi University Reservation Execution Committee and others while seeking to be impleaded in the matter said that the data available in respect of 39 colleges of Delhi University indicates that in 2009 a total of 1,552 seats belonging to reserved category were converted to general category.

The percentage of conversion of OBC seats to general category was 81.5 percent in LL.B, 73 percent in M.A. English, 85.71 percent in M.Phil (Eco.) and 83.33 percent in M.Phil (Operational Research). In all there are 80 colleges affiliated to Delhi University.