NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has said it is not mandatory to disclose cut off marks in horizontal reservation.
The top court also held not disclosing cut off marks for persons with benchmark disabilities in an examination is neither arbitrary nor violative of fundamental rights as such candidates fall in the category of horizontal reservation.
A bench of Justices Bela M Trivedi and Satish Chandra Sharma dismissed appeals filed by Rekha Sharma and Ratan Lal, who applied for the post of Civil Judge in Rajasthan, questioning the decision of authorities not to disclose cut off marks for persons with benchmark disabilities.
The bench said undisputedly, the reservation for the persons with disabilities has been treated as horizontal reservation i.e. the reservation under Clause (1) of Article 16, and not the vertical reservation i.e. the reservation under Clause (4) of Article 16 of the Constitution of India.
After the clarification made in Indra Sawhney (1992) (Mandal Commission case by nine-judge bench), the court said there remains no doubt that the reservation for persons with disabilities would be relatable to Clause (1) of Article 16 and the persons selected against this quota will be placed in appropriate category i.e. if he/she belongs to Scheduled Category, he/she will be placed in that category by making necessary adjustments, and if he/she belongs to open category, necessary adjustments will be made in the open category.
Referring to the SC judgment in case of 'Anil Kumar Gupta and Others Vs State of UP and Others' (1995), the bench said the special reservations cannot be proportionately divided among the vertical (social) reservation categories, and the candidates eligible for special reservation categories have to be provided overall seats reserved for them, either by adjusting them against any of the social/vertical reservations or otherwise, and thus they are inter transferable.
Therefore, the bench said, "Fixation of cut off marks for other categories and non fixation of cut off marks for the category of persons with benchmark disability could neither be said to be arbitrary nor violative of any of the fundamental rights of the appellants".
The court, referring to the advertisement, said the vacancies in case of women candidates were classified or identified for each category i.e. General, OBC, SC, ST, MBC whereas for the persons with benchmark disabilities, no such vacancies were mentioned in the said categories.
In the three-tier process of the examination scheme, the number of candidates to be admitted to the main examination were 15 times the total number of vacancies (category wise) and the candidates had to qualify themselves by securing the minimum percentage of marks fixed for each of the categories in the preliminary examination, the bench said.
The court said therefore, the persons with benchmark disabilities falling under the overall horizontal reservation had to qualify for the mains examination by securing minimum cut off marks fixed for the concerned category in which he/she had applied.
