Repeat beneficiaries gaining from quota, laments Madras HC – Times of India

Chennai: Only family members of those who have already tasted the benefits of reservation are, once again, reaping the gains while the downtrodden still remain as downtrodden, the Madras high court has observed.
“It is up to the parliament to take a decision on that because the basic structure of the Constitution cannot be changed. At the same time, the reservation was provided for a specific period of years, but it is still being continued. There can be modifications also to see that the downtrodden may not remain the downtrodden forever,” said the first bench of Chief Justice Munishwar Nath Bhandari and Justice D Bharatha Chakravarthy on Thursday.
The judges were making the observations while reserving their orders on a batch of pleas challenging the validity of Tamil Nadu government’s 7.5% reservation for students from government schools in admission to medical and other professional courses.
As to the contentions made by senior counsel Kapil Sibal that the reservation had been provided based on the recommendation of a committee which had gone into the backwardness of students from government schools, the bench said: “The state should have taken steps to improve the standard of education in government schools. Instead, it has come up with a reservation.”
To the arguments that the government school students could not afford private coaching to clear NEET, the court said, “why students need coaching centres to clear competitive exams if the standard of education in schools are up to the mark.” These days students are not going to schools but are going to only coaching centers, the court remarked.
Senior advocate P Wilson submitted that the reservation is justifiable and legal, and that it was necessitated by ‘cultural capital’ reasons. The Supreme Court has made it clear that marks alone cannot determine merit and the background of the student must also be considered, he said.
Refusing to concur, the bench said, reservation can be provided only on the basis of social and educational backwardness and anything else is not allowed. To introduce terms like cultural capital the Constitution has to be rewritten, the court added.