Discuss the doctrine of prospective overruling and the scope of Article 142 with reference to the OBC creamy layer controversy.

Prospective overruling is the technique by which a court corrects the law for the future while leaving transactions already concluded under the old understanding undisturbed. Its live test today is the Union's plea that the Supreme Court's judgment in Union of India v. Rohith Nathan (March 11, 2026) on OBC non-creamy layer status apply only prospectively [1].

The doctrine and its rationale

• Protects reliance and finality: persons who ordered their affairs under the earlier position, and who were not parties to the litigation, are shielded from retrospective disturbance [1].
• Applied selectively, usually where a ruling would otherwise unsettle completed appointments, admissions or fiscal transactions.

Scope of Article 142

• Empowers the Court to pass any decree needed for "complete justice"; the Centre invokes it to declare the judgment prospective and to seek two years to fix equivalence of posts and frame a uniform mechanism [1].
• It is a remedial, not legislative power — it cannot substitute for executive rule-making, and repeated use to postpone a corrected rule risks diluting the right the judgment recognised.

The creamy layer controversy as illustration

• The judgment directs re-assessment under the 1993 Office Memorandum, excluding parental salary and agricultural income from the income test [1] — consistent with the Standing Committee on Welfare of OBCs, which recorded that salary or agricultural income alone cannot determine creamy layer status [2].
• Retrospectivity would unsettle cadre allocation, seniority and admissions [1]; prospectivity, however, denies relief to candidates wrongly refused certificates.
• The administrative gap is old: equivalence was notified only for PSUs, public sector banks and insurance institutions (JMGS-I and above; ₹8 lakh ceiling) [3], while autonomous bodies and the private sector remain unmapped — a lapse the Committee said pushed OBC candidates into court [2].

A calibrated course serves both values: protect completed appointments, yet let the corrected test govern claims still pending. Read with Articles 16(4) and 338B, Article 142 should be used not merely to buy time but to hold the executive to a time-bound, reportable equivalence exercise — securing both administrative stability and substantive equality.