Supreme Court upholds 27% OBC quota in NEET

Subject – Polity

Context – ‘Reservation not at odds with merit’: Supreme Court upholds 27% OBC quota in NEET

Concept –

Underlining that “reservation is not at odds with merit but furthers its distributive consequences”, the Supreme Court said Thursday that “merit cannot be reduced to narrow definitions of performance in an open competitive examination” and “high scores in an examination are not a proxy for merit”.
- It said merit “should be socially contextualized and reconceptualized as an instrument that advances social goods like equality that we as a society value”.
The Bench upheld the Constitutional validity of reservation for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the All India Quota for National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for undergraduate and postgraduate medical admissions.
Explaining how the jurisprudence of reservation had come to recognise substantive equality and not just formal equality, the bench said “Articles 15 (4) and 15 (5) are not an exception to Article 15 (1), which itself sets out the principle of substantive equality (including the recognition of existing inequalities).
- Thus, Articles 15 (4) and 15 (5) become a restatement of a particular facet of the rule of substantive equality that has been set out in Article 15 (1)”.
Article 15 (4) of the Constitution enables the State to make reservation for SCs and STs while Article 15 (5) empowers it to make reservation in educational institutions. Article 15 (1) says the State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them.

Substantive Equality

Substantive equality is a fundamental aspect of human rights law that is concerned with equitable outcomes and equal opportunities for disadvantaged and marginalized people and groups in society.
Substantive equality recognizes that the law must take elements such as discrimination, marginalization, and unequal distribution into account in order to achieve equal results for basic human rights, opportunities, and access to goods and services.
Substantive equality is primarily achieved by implementing special measures in order to assist or advance the lives of disadvantaged individuals. Such measures are aimed at ensuring that they are given the same opportunities as everyone else.