Inconsistency of Score-Elevated Reserve Policy for Indian Affirmative Action
Abstract
India has enacted an intricate affirmative action program through a reservation system since the 1950s. Notably, in 2008, a historic judgment by the Supreme Court of India (SCI) in the case of Ashoka Kumar Thakur vs. Union of India mandated a 27 percent reservation to the Other Backward Classes (OBC). The SCI's ruling suggested implementing the OBC reservation as a soft reserve without defining a procedural framework. The SCI recommended a maximum of 10 points difference between the cutoff scores of the open-category and OBC positions. We show that this directive conflicts with India's fundamental Supreme Court mandates on reservation policy. Moreover, we show that the score-elevated reserve policy proposed by S\"onmez and Yenmez (2022) is inconsistent with this directive.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2312.14648,
title = {Inconsistency of Score-Elevated Reserve Policy for Indian Affirmative Action},
author = {Orhan Aygn and Bertan Turhan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.14648},
year = {2023}
}