EWS Reservation - boon or bane :

The President of India gave his assent to 103rd Constitutional amendment act on 14th January 2019 to the Constitution, which aims to provide ten per cent reservation in public employment and higher education for economically weaker section (EWS) of the Indian General Category population. The said amendment has added sub-clause (6) to Article 15 and Article 16 of the Indian Constitution and creates a new class of citizen based on economic criteria.Gujarat has become the first state to implement reservation for economically weaker section of society.

This step to categorize and reserve the section of population on the basis of their economic standing rather than caste is garnering a lot of admiration.

The essence of Social Justice contained in our preamble does not get fulfilled if we only think about the caste backwardness. Economic backwardness or Poverty is also an equally important menace to our society which denies certain basic rights to individuals affected.

Poverty strikes at the very core of a decent and sustainable livelihood to individuals in education and employment. The denial of such basic livelihood results ultimately in a life lived in disadvantage and lost opportunities.

We live in a country where people deliberately protest to be categorized as backward to avail undue benefit of caste based reservation. The need for a quota for EWS was crying in our faces for a long time.

The concept of Social Justice has not been defined in our constitution but is left to lawmakers to update and make changes from time to time as per the need of the hour.

Referring to Landmark judgments pronounced by the Supreme court, it is a settled fact that the Parliament’s power to amend the constitution is limited by “doctrine of basic structure”- borrowed from Germany, according to which no law can violate the Constitution’s essential features. The basic structure doctrine is an Indian judicial principle that the Constitution of India has certain basic features that cannot be altered or destroyed through amendments by the parliament. It was originally suggested in India by Justice J R Mudholkar in his dissent in Sajjan Singh (1965) case. 

There is not any set pattern or list as to which features of the constitution are considered 'basic' but is determined by the court in each case that comes before it.

Some arument that the current provided EWS reservation violates the 50% capping done by Supreme Court in the landmark case of Indira Sawhney but the reservation passes the test of constitutionality as the said 50% quota was set only for the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes (SCs/STs) and the Other Backward Classes (OBC) categories under Articles 15(4) and 16(4) of the Constitution. The EWS is introduced through proper amendments made in Article 15 and 16 of the Constitution. Hence it does not stand violative of any article or provision and does not infringe any existing rights in persons.

The EWS reservations could add a desirable dimension and could provide a ground to rectify flaws in the current reservation system based on the parameter of caste. It could initiate much awaited change in this reservation system by changing the primary criterion to identify actual beneficiaries. But this would depend on whether the policy is implemented scrupulously in line with the fundamental constitutional precepts.

Reservation or not, the aim of the government is to provide equal resources and opportunities to all its citizens to ensure an level playing field.