Not mandatory for cut off marks in horizontal reservation, Supreme Court

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday said not disclosing cut off marks for persons with benchmark disabilities in an examination is neither arbitrary nor violative of fundamental rights as such candidates fall in the category of horizontal reservation.

A bench of Justices Bela M Trivedi and Satish Chandra Sharma said undisputedly, the reservation for the persons with disabilities has been treated as horizontal reservation i.e. the reservation under Clause (1) of Article 16, and not the vertical reservation i.e. the reservation under Clause (4) of Article 16 of the Constitution of India.

In view of the clarification made in Indra Sawhney (1992) (Mandal Commission case), the bench said there remains no doubt that the reservation for persons with disabilities would be relatable to Clause (1) of Article 16 and the persons selected against this quota will be placed in appropriate category i.e. if he/she belongs to Scheduled Category, he/she will be placed in that category by making necessary adjustments, and if he/she belongs to open category, necessary adjustments will be made in the open category.

Relying upon the SC judgment in case of 'Anil Kumar Gupta and Others Vs State of UPand Others' (1995), the bench said the special reservations cannot be proportionately divided among the vertical (social) reservation categories, and the candidates eligible for special reservation categories have to be provided overall seats reserved for them, either by adjusting them against any of the social/vertical reservations or otherwise, and thus they are intertransferable.

The court dismissed appeals filed by Rekha Sharma and Ratan Lal, who applied for the post of Civil Judge in Rajasthan but were aggrieved with the decision of authorities not to disclose cut off marks for persons with benchmark disabilities.

The bench said, "Fixation of cut off marks for other categories and non fixation of cut off marks for the category of persons with benchmark disability could neither be said to be arbitrary nor violative of any of the fundamental rights of the appellants".

Referring to the advertisement, the bench said the vacancies in case of women candidates were classified or identified for each category i.e. General, OBC, SC, ST, MBC whereas for the persons with benchmark disabilities, no such vacancies were mentioned in the said categories.

Further, in the three-tier process of the examination scheme, the number of candidates to be admitted to the main examination were 15 times the total number of vacancies (category wise) and the candidates had to qualify themselves by securing the minimum percentage of marks fixed for each of the categories in the preliminary examination, the bench said.

"Therefore, the persons with benchmark disabilities falling under the overall horizontal reservation had to qualify for the mains examination by securing minimum cut off marks fixed for the concerned category in which he/she had applied," the bench said.