The Reservation Ceiling: How India’s Well-Intentioned Concessions Are Creating a New Inequality 

India’s reservation system faces a fundamental paradox where the very concessions designed to empower marginalized groups—such as fee waivers and age relaxations—are being used to penalize them, as highlighted by the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in the Sajib Roy case.

This judgment upheld a 1998 policy that prevents candidates from reserved categories who use these facilitative measures from competing for general merit seats, even when their scores surpass the general category cut-off.

Consequently, a system intended to provide compensatory justice and substantive equality instead creates an artificial ceiling, forcing meritorious candidates into reserved seats and effectively punishing them for their historical disadvantage, thereby undermining the constitutional spirit of Articles 14 and 16(4) by treating necessary bridges to opportunity as permanent barriers to full recognition of their merit.

The Reservation Ceiling: How India’s Well-Intentioned Concessions Are Creating a New Inequality 

In the fiercely competitive arena of Indian public employment, the debate around reservation is often crudely simplified: “merit versus privilege.” But a more insidious conflict is unfolding within the system’s fine print, one that pits the tools of empowerment against the very people they are meant to help. This is the paradox of concessions—where a fee waiver or an extra year of eligibility, designed as a bridge to opportunity, can become a cage, locking meritorious candidates from marginalized communities out of the general category they rightfully earned. 

The recent Supreme Court judgment in Union of India vs Sajib Roy (2025) has thrown this paradox into sharp relief. The ruling upheld a 1998 Office Memorandum (OM) that bars candidates from Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) who avail of age or fee relaxations from being considered for “general” or unreserved seats, even if their scores surpass the general category cut-off. 

This legal technicality, seemingly administrative, strikes at the heart of the constitutional promise of equality. It creates a perverse scenario where a candidate’s economic and social disadvantage is used against them as a permanent marker, effectively punishing them for accepting the helping hand the state itself extended. 

The Sajib Roy Case: A Tale of Two Interpretations 

To understand the stakes, let’s dissect the case. An OBC candidate, Sajib Roy, utilized a permissible age relaxation to take a competitive exam. When the results were declared, he hadn’t scored enough to secure a seat within the OBC quota. However, his marks were higher than the last candidate selected in the general category. Logically, he claimed a seat on the general merit list. 

The Supreme Court denied his claim. Its reasoning was procedural: the 1998 OM for that specific recruitment explicitly forbade such “migration.” The court held that the right to compete for a general seat depends entirely on the recruitment rules of the day, and in this case, the rules were clear. 

This decision, however, stands in direct tension with a broader, more philosophical interpretation of affirmative action laid out in earlier judgments. In Jitendra Kumar Singh vs State of UP (2010), the Supreme Court had astutely observed that relaxations in age or fees are merely “facilitative measures.” They are not the reservation itself but are intended to level the playing field at the entry point—to ensure that poverty or a delayed start in education doesn’t prevent someone from even entering the arena. 

Once in that arena, the Jitendra Kumar logic goes, the candidate should be judged solely on their performance. If they excel, their success should be acknowledged as merit, pure and simple. To force them into a reserved seat despite outperforming general category peers is to devalue their achievement and contradict the very essence of a merit-based competition. 

The Constitutional Spirit vs. The Executive Letter 

The core of the conflict lies in the interpretation of Articles 14 (Equality before Law) and 16(4) (Reservation in Public Employment) of the Indian Constitution. 

The purpose of Article 16(4) is not to create a parallel, lower-merit system. It is a tool of compensatory justice, a recognition that centuries of historical oppression and social exclusion have created a deep deficit that requires proactive state intervention to correct. Its goal is substantive equality—an equality of outcome, not just of opportunity on paper. 

The 1998 OM, and the Sajib Roy judgment that upheld it, risk enforcing a formalistic equality that ignores this context. By treating a fee waiver—a concession meant to offset economic hardship—as a brand that permanently segregates a candidate, the policy creates a “separate but equal” structure that is inherently unequal. 

Consider the hypothetical posed by advocate Ganesh Pandit: a Dalit candidate from a family of agricultural laborers scrapes together a reduced application fee of Rs. 250 instead of the standard Rs. 1,000. She then proceeds to outperform hundreds of general category candidates. Under the current interpretation, her use of the fee concession would force her to take a reserved seat, effectively reducing the number of general seats available and reinforcing the narrative that reserved category candidates cannot truly compete. 

This is not facilitation; it is a ceiling. It tells marginalized candidates: “We will help you get to the starting line, but we will not fully acknowledge you if you win the race.” 

The Lived Reality: Poverty and Policy Collide 

Any discussion of reservation that ignores its socioeconomic dimension is divorced from Indian reality. The communities eligible for reservation—Dalits, Adivasis, and OBCs—are disproportionately represented among India’s poor, the food-insecure, and the underemployed. A fee waiver isn’t a trivial perk; for many, it is the difference between attempting the exam and being forced to abandon the dream. 

To then use this economic concession as the grounds to deny a general-category seat is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the disadvantage. It conflates a tool designed to mitigate economic marginalization with the core policy of addressing social and educational backwardness. The candidate isn’t seeking a “double benefit”; they are using one tool (fee/age relaxation) to access the competition, and then relying on their own merit to secure a seat. The system, however, is bundling these two distinct elements together, to the candidate’s detriment. 

The Path Forward: Recalibrating for True Justice 

So, how do we resolve this paradox? The solution lies in a recalibration that aligns executive policy with constitutional spirit. 

• Legislative Clarity: Parliament must step in to provide a clear, uniform legal framework that supersedes contradictory office memorandums. The law should explicitly state that availing facilitative concessions like fee waivers or age relaxations does not disqualify a candidate from competing for and being appointed to an unreserved seat based on their merit. 

• Judicial Revisitation: The Supreme Court needs to reconcile the Sajib Roy judgment with the principles of Jitendra Kumar Singh and the landmark Indra Sawhney case. A larger bench may be required to affirm that the goal of reservation is inclusive growth, not ghettoization, and that recognizing merit wherever it comes from strengthens the nation’s institutions. 

• Shift in Public Discourse: We must move beyond the simplistic “merit vs. reservation” binary. The real merit lies in overcoming immense structural barriers to achieve a high score. A candidate who does so with fewer resources has demonstrated exceptional merit, and their success should be celebrated, not qualified with an asterisk. 

True justice in India’s reservation policy will be achieved not when we police the boundaries between categories, but when we create a system where the concessions meant to empower no longer become ceilings that limit potential. The bridges we build for equality must not lead to walled gardens. It is time to ensure that every candidate, regardless of the tools they used to enter the arena, is allowed to soar as high as their talent and hard work can take them.