Should agricultural and salary income be counted in the creamy layer test? Critically examine.

The creamy layer, evolved from Indra Sawhney (1992) and operationalised by the 1993 DoPT Office Memorandum, is a status-based filter, with the income/wealth test as a supplement. Whether pay slips and farm receipts belong in that test was settled in Union of India v. Rohith Nathan (2026), which held they do not [3].

The case for counting them

• Administrative simplicity: gross income is verifiable; post-equivalence requires a grade-mapping exercise that was operationalised only for central PSUs, banks and insurance institutions [2], leaving private firms, universities and autonomous bodies unmapped [1].
• Preventing leakage: a private-sector parent earning well above the ₹8 lakh ceiling [1] may be socially advanced yet escape the rank test, letting benefits be cornered by the affluent.
• Horizontal equity: excluding two large income streams narrows the test to business and rental income, which is easier to under-report.

The case against

• Textual mandate: the 1993 OM itself directs that salary and agricultural income "shall not be taken into account"; the 2004 clarification adding salary for PSU staff was struck down as hostile discrimination between children of government and non-government employees [3].
• Backwardness is social, not arithmetical: a Class III clerk's or a farmer's child remains socially backward despite a good pay revision or harvest. The Standing Committee on Welfare of OBCs echoed this, urging exemption for Class III and IV employees' children [1].
• Judicial burden: the Ministry's failure to identify equivalent posts in autonomous bodies has itself "led OBC candidates to seek judicial intervention" [1] — income was used as a shortcut for undone homework.

The balanced position is that salary and agricultural income should stay out of the test, but only if the equivalence of posts exercise is completed time-bound and jointly with parent ministries [1], with the ceiling revised on a rule-based cycle. Exclusion then becomes what Articles 16(4) and 335 intend — a measure of social advancement, not of arithmetic.