Same Candidate, Same Category, Two Different Answers

Same Candidate, Same Category, Two Different Answers

A candidate who cleared his OBC status in one UPSC-conducted examination and had it rejected in the Civil Services Examination under the identical category is not a bureaucratic anomaly - it is the direct, predictable output of a rule that treated two identically placed people differently based on where their parent worked. That is the plain-English version of what the Supreme Court found on March 11 and it is the reason nearly 100 candidates since 2016 have spent years contesting a rejection the Court has now called "hostile discrimination."

The

Rule as Written and the Rule as Practised The 1993 Office Memorandum excluded salary and agricultural income from the creamy-layer wealth test, using instead the "equivalence of posts"

• Group A, B, C or D - to judge a government employee's status. That was the rule as written. A 2004 DoPT clarification then quietly changed the rule as practised: for children of PSU and private-sector employees, salary income itself became the determining criterion, with no reference to the nature of the post. The result was two different tests for two categories of candidates who, on paper, belonged to the same OBC bracket - a government officer's child judged by rank, a PSU employee's child judged by rupees. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law; Articles 15 and 16 extend that to non-discrimination and equal opportunity in public employment. The Court's finding was direct: applying an income test to one group and a status test to an identically placed other group is "equals being treated unequally," which is precisely what Article 14 forbids.

Why "Non-Retrospective" Is the Real Legal Battle Now The

Centre isn't contesting the judgment's correctness - it is invoking a narrower, well-established doctrine: prospective overruling, the idea that a court can correct the law going forward without unsettling every past decision made under the old, flawed rule.

Applied here, that would mean CSE-2025's "substantially concluded" allocation process stays untouched even though it was decided using the very 2004 criterion the Court just invalidated. The tension is real: prospective-only application protects administrative finality for one batch, but it also means candidates who were wrongly excluded under an unconstitutional rule - for up to a decade - may see that correction arrive too late for the process that mattered to them.

For the exam, the sharper insight isn't "the Supreme Court struck down a discriminatory rule." It's that correcting an Article 14 violation and preserving administrative finality are not automatically compatible - and how the Court eventually rules on retrospective scope will decide which value it treats as paramount.