Should judicial pronouncements on reservation criteria be applied retrospectively? Discuss with reference to the recent Supreme Court ruling on OBC creamy layer.

Reservation criteria decide life-chances, so when courts reinterpret them the real question is how far back the correction should reach. The Supreme Court's 11 March judgment on the income/wealth test for the OBC creamy layer, and the Centre's plea for clarification, have revived this debate [4].

The setting of the dispute

• Indra Sawhney (1992) upheld 27% OBC reservation under Article 16(4) but mandated exclusion of the creamy layer, leaving thresholds to the executive [1].
• DoPT operationalised this through successive Office Memoranda, the ceiling standing at ₹8 lakh gross annual income since 1 September 2017 [3].
• The income/wealth test is only one layer; salary and agricultural income alone cannot decide creamy layer status, and equivalence of posts in private/autonomous bodies remains unsettled [2].
• The batch decided in March arose from claims of OBC candidates excluded in Civil Services Examinations since 2015 [4].

Case for retrospective application

• A judgment declares what the law always meant; denying retrospectivity leaves wrongly excluded candidates without remedy.
• Reservation is a restitutive guarantee — a purely prospective ruling rewards years of flawed administrative interpretation.
• Litigants who fought for a decade would win a right but no relief, weakening incentives to seek judicial review.

Case against

• The Centre warns of a "cascading effect" on services settled from 2012 onwards, affecting even Unreserved candidates who would face unseating [4].
• Retrospective verification of parental income and post-status across a decade of recruitment cycles is administratively impractical.
• Finality of appointments and legitimate expectation of serving officers are themselves equity concerns.

The tension is not between law and administration but between two claims of fairness. The balanced path is the Court's own doctrine of prospective overruling — declare the correct criterion for the future, while granting targeted relief to the identified petitioners, ideally through supernumerary posts rather than displacement. A special Bench settling this, coupled with clearer DoPT guidelines on equivalence, would honour both Indra Sawhney's promise of substantive equality and the stability that public service demands.