Thirty Years Without Equivalence: How an Unfinished Administrative Task Became a Constitutional Wrong

The Wrong Was

Written by Delay and Now Delay Is Asking for More Time Article 14 guarantees every person equality before the law and the equal protection of the laws. In plain terms, the State may treat people differently only if the difference rests on a rational basis connected to the purpose of the rule.

The Supreme Court's March 11, 2026 judgment in Union of India v. Rohith Nathan found that the OBC creamy layer rules failed that test. The more important question is how they came to fail it: through an administrative task the government began in 1993 and never finished.

The rule as written in 1993 After Indra Sawhney (1992) required that the socially advanced among OBCs be excluded from reservation, the DoPT's September 1993 memorandum defined that "creamy layer" through status, not salary.

• A child of a government servant was judged by the rank of the parent's post.
• Salary income and agricultural income were expressly excluded from the income test. The logic was sound. Rank in public service was treated as a marker of social advancement; income alone was not. The unfinished task. That scheme had an obvious next step. Parents who worked in PSUs, public sector banks and private companies had to be placed on the same ladder by establishing which of their posts were equivalent to government ranks. That exercise was not completed for decades.

The rule as practised from 2004 Without an equivalence table, the DoPT's clarification of October 14, 2004 took a shortcut.

For PSU, bank and private-sector parents, it counted salary income.

Two families with parents in comparable positions now faced different tests:

• The government officer's child was judged by rank, with salary ignored.
• The PSU manager's child was judged by salary and often pushed into the creamy layer. That difference had no rational link to social advancement. It existed only because the administrative work had not been done. The Supreme Court called it hostile discrimination.

Weighing prospective overruling under Article 142 The Centre now asks the Court to use Article 142, which lets it pass any order needed for complete justice, to make the judgment operate only from now on. The case for prospective effect is real.

• Service and cadre allocations since 2012 were made on the old rules.
• Officers who were not parties to the litigation could see their seniority disturbed.
• Recruitment by railways, banks and paramilitary forces could be reopened. The case against is equally real.
• The wrongly excluded candidates are also not responsible for the delay.
• The judgment already offered a middle path: supernumerary posts, which add seats for those wronged without taking seats away from anyone.
• Seeking two more years to finish an exercise pending since 1993 asks the Court to reward the very delay that caused the wrong.