Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh): A division bench of Madhya Pradesh High Court headed by chief justice Mohammed Rafiq on Monday reserved its judgment on the petition challenging the legality of hike in OBC quota in state government jobs and admission include education institutions from 14 % to 27% after the arguments on the issues from the both sides.
The next hearing in the case will be on September 30. Till that time, stay on the decision to hike reservation for OBC will continue to be enforced.
The court further asked the state government not to go ahead with 27 % reservation for OBC section in exams/ recruitments in jobs till the final order.
The state government had recently passed an order asking all the departments of the state government to go ahead with 27% reservation for OBCs in all the exams/ recruitments accept for those, where MP High Court stay is enforce, quoting the opinion they seek from advocate general of Madhya Pradesh Pureshendra Kaurav.
A petition challenging the state government's recent order to increase OBC quota has also been filed in the High Court. The court has linked up this petition with petition challenging the legality of hiking OBC reservation quota.
Solicitor general of India, Tushar Mehta, advocate general of Madhya Pradesh and other senior lawyers practicing at Supreme Court and Madhya Pradesh High Court appeared in favour of 27% OBC reservation.
The state government reaffirmed its stand saying that the state has 50 OBC population, therefore the community needs 27% reservations to uplift the socio-economic status.
The petitioner quoted the Supreme Court’s judgement on Maratha reservation that population can’t be the basis of reservation quota and apprised the court that if reservation quota for OBC is increased from 14% to 27%, the overall reservation would be more than 50%. This will be against the judgement of Indira Sawhney case, wherein the Supreme Court had categorically stated that reservation can’t be increased more than 50%, the petitioner said.
