New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday restrained 'until further orders' the Delhi University and the Pune-based Symbiosis International University from providing 27 per cent seats reservation for OBCs, even as the Centre sought vacation of an earlier stay on the issue.
A bench of Justices BN Aggrawal and PP Naolekar also issued notices to the universities to file their replies following two separate petitions challenging their decision to implement the Central Education Insitutions (Reservations in Admissions)Act, 2006, which provided for 27 per cent seats reservation in elite Central Educational Institutions.
The petitions filed by the NGO Youth for Equality and two students — Ankit Kumar, Shashank Shekhar — complained that the two universities were going ahead with the process of providing the 27 per cent reservations despite the apex court staying the controversial Act on March 29, this year.
Earlier in the day, the Centre which moved an application for vacating the stay, maintained that the impugned Act protected the number of seats available to the general category in the previous academic year while increasing seats for socially and educationally backward classes and proportionately for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
As such the Centre maintained that the Act was not detrimental to the interest of any section of the population.
In the PIL filed against the Delhi and Symbiosis universities, the petitioners submitted that the varsities' move to go ahead with the 27 per cent reservation quota was unconstitutional as the apex court had stayed the operation of the Act.
The petitioners argued that since the Government itself was restrained on March 29 from enforcing the quota policy due to "insufficient data" on the community's population, the universities cannot take upon themselves the task of identifying the OBCs until the matter was finally resolved.
On March 29, a two-member bench of the apex court had stayed the operation of the quota Act following a batch of writ petitions challenging the Central Government's reservation policy.
But during the hearing of the arguments, the Centre made a strong plea for referring the matter to a Larger Bench as the issue involved substantive question of Constitutional rights of a citizen.
Accordingly on May 17, the bench of Justices Arijit Pasayat and L S Penta referred the matter to a Constitution Bench. The bench is yet to be constituted.
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