Discuss the evolution of the 'creamy layer' concept in OBC reservations in India, and critically examine the Supreme Court's 2026 ruling rejecting income as the sole determinant.

The 'creamy layer' denotes the socially advanced sections among Other Backward Classes who are excluded from reservation so that benefits reach the genuinely backward. Its criteria have evolved from a judicial mandate into executive memoranda, and the Supreme Court's March 2026 ruling marks a decisive course correction.

Evolution of the concept

• Indra Sawhney (1992): a nine-judge Bench upheld 27% OBC reservation and made exclusion of the creamy layer a constitutional imperative under Article 16(4), keyed to social advancement rather than income alone [2].
• DoPT Office Memoranda (1993, 2004, revised 2017) operationalised it through a rank-and-income test — the ceiling raised to ₹8 lakh in 2017 — while excluding salary and agricultural income from computation [2].
• Equivalence of posts emerged as the weak link: parents in PSUs, banks and private firms were judged by salary, unlike similarly placed government servants. The B.P. Sharma Expert Committee (2019) examined this, and equivalence for Central PSUs, banks and insurance institutions was approved [2].
• The Parliamentary Committee on Welfare of OBCs (Chair: Ganesh Singh) urged that Category IIC employees not be disentitled to reservation [2][3].

Critically examining the 2026 ruling (Union of India v. Rohith Nathan)

Strengths

• Rightly holds that creamy-layer status cannot rest on parental salary alone; parents' employment and social status must be weighed — faithful to Indra Sawhney's logic [1].
• Treats the artificial distinction between similarly placed government and PSU employees as violating the equality mandate of Article 14 [1].
• Provides real remedy through supernumerary posts for wrongly rejected candidates [1].

Limitations

• A status-based test is administratively demanding; the Centre has told the Court that implementation is "extremely difficult", with equivalence norms still unresolved between ministries [4].
• Diluting the income filter without complete equivalence tables risks continued benefit-capture by affluent OBC families.

The judgment is jurisprudentially sound but administratively unfinished. The way forward lies in DoPT notifying comprehensive, periodically revised equivalence schedules with a transparent grievance mechanism — converting the Court's promise of substantive equality under Article 16(4) into an implementable rule.