On 7 January 2019, the Union Cabinet approved the Constitution (103rd Amendment) Bill, which was passed by both houses of Parliament within 48 hours and received presidential assent on 12 January 2019. The amendment inserted Articles 15(6) and 16(6) into the Constitution, providing a 10% reservation in government jobs and educational institutions for “economically weaker sections” (EWS) among citizens who do not already benefit from existing caste-based reservations (SC, ST, and OBC). This was the first time in independent India that economic criteria alone became the basis for a nationwide reservation in public employment and education.
The stated objective was straightforward: to extend affirmative action to poorer sections of the “general category” (those outside SC, ST, and OBC lists) who had hitherto remained ineligible for any quota despite economic hardship. The government argued that caste-based reservations addressed historical social and educational backwardness, but a significant section of forward-caste citizens also faced economic deprivation in a rapidly changing economy.
To qualify under the EWS category, a person must satisfy three primary conditions that apply to the entire family (parents + siblings below 18 + spouse + children):
- Annual family income below ₹8 lakh (from all sources, including salary, agriculture, and business, but excluding certain allowances).
- Ownership of agricultural land below 5 acres.
- Residential house below 1,000 square feet, or a residential plot below 100 square yards in notified municipalities or 200 square yards in non-notified areas.
If a candidate meets all these conditions and does not belong to SC, ST, or OBC, they become eligible for the 10% EWS quota.
At first glance, the policy appears to target genuine economic disadvantage. Yet, almost immediately after the notification in late January 2019, a vigorous public debate began about whether the chosen thresholds were stringent enough to identify the “truly needy” or so liberal that they would cover the overwhelming majority of the general-category population.
Income data available at the time lent credence to the latter view. According to the Income Tax Department’s own figures released in 2018 by then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, only about 76 lakh individual assessees declared a gross total income above ₹5 lakh for Assessment Year 2017-18. Given that many high earners either do not file returns or under-report income, even the most conservative estimates suggested that fewer than 5% of Indian households had a declared income exceeding ₹8 lakh per annum. Independent surveys such as the 2011–12 India Human Development Survey and later leaked reports of the 2017–18 Consumption Expenditure Survey placed the proportion of households earning more than ₹8 lakh even lower.
Land-holding statistics from the 2015–16 Agricultural Census showed that 86% of operational holdings in India were below 5 acres. Urban and peri-urban housing data from the 2011 Census and subsequent NFHS-5 (2019–21) reports indicated that a substantial majority of households lived in dwellings smaller than 1,000 sq ft. While precise data on municipal plot sizes were scarce, the pattern was clear: the three quantifiable criteria together covered well over 80–90% of the general-category population. In effect, the EWS quota became available to almost everyone who was not already covered by SC, ST, or OBC reservations.
This unusually wide net raised several analytical and policy questions that dominated discussions throughout 2019.
First, what is the meaningful distinction between the erstwhile open (merit) category and the new EWS segment when the vast majority of general-category candidates qualify for the latter? In practice, the previous 50% open seats (approximately, after accounting for existing reservations) were now notionally split into roughly 40% “unreserved” and 10% “EWS”. Since almost every general-category candidate could produce an EWS certificate, competition remained largely unchanged: the same pool of candidates was now competing for the same total number of seats, merely redistributed across two labels. Critics described this as a rebranding exercise rather than an expansion of opportunity.
Second, the ₹8 lakh income ceiling invited scrutiny when juxtaposed with taxation policy. The basic exemption limit for individual income tax in 2019–20 was ₹2.5 lakh (₹5 lakh for senior citizens after the interim budget). Thus, a household earning ₹7 lakh per annum was expected to pay income tax (indicating taxable capacity) yet was simultaneously classified as “economically weaker”. This apparent contradiction highlighted the challenge of defining economic backwardness in a country with large informal-sector earnings and widespread tax evasion.
Third, the policy blurred the distinction between poverty alleviation and compensatory discrimination. Traditional reservation policy in India, as upheld in landmark judgments (Mandal Commission, Indra Sawhney 1992), rested on the principle of addressing historical social and educational backwardness, not merely present-day economic hardship. Economic deprivation was acknowledged but was not considered sufficient by itself to warrant reservation, partly because poverty alleviation was seen as the domain of welfare schemes (PDS, MGNREGA, PM-KISAN, etc.) rather than quota-based affirmative action. By introducing purely economic reservation, the 103rd Amendment marked a doctrinal shift whose long-term implications were still being debated in 2019.
Within the general category itself, the uniform ₹8 lakh ceiling created an internal “creamy layer” problem. A family earning ₹90,000 per month (₹10.8 lakh annually) was excluded, while one earning ₹66,000 per month (₹7.92 lakh) qualified. Yet both were significantly better off than families below the poverty line. In a hypothetical scenario where only one EWS seat is available, it would almost certainly go to the candidate with ₹66,000 monthly income — someone likely to have had access to private schooling, coaching, and better nutrition — rather than a genuinely destitute applicant. Thus, the quota risked benefiting the upper stratum of the eligible group rather than the poorest.
It is worth noting that the ₹8 lakh ceiling was not arbitrarily chosen; it mirrored the “creamy layer” income limit already applied to OBC reservations since 2017. The OBC creamy-layer limit had itself been progressively raised from ₹1 lakh in 1993 to ₹3 lakh (2004), ₹4.5 lakh (2008), ₹6 lakh (later 2008), and finally ₹8 lakh. Each upward revision expanded the beneficiary base, leading to accusations of political appeasement over the years. The adoption of the same ₹8 lakh figure for the general category therefore followed an established precedent, even if the social justification differed.
A significant constitutional hurdle emerged immediately. The Supreme Court’s 1992 Indra Sawhney judgment had capped total reservation at 50% (except in extraordinary circumstances). By adding 10% on top of the existing ~49.5% (15% SC + 7.5% ST + 27% OBC) plus state-level variations, the total quota breached the 50% ceiling in most states. The government addressed this by inserting a specific enabling clause in the 103rd Amendment stating that the new reservation would be “in addition to existing reservations and subject to a maximum of ten per cent”. Whether this legislative override would withstand judicial scrutiny remained uncertain throughout 2019; multiple petitions challenging the amendment were admitted by the Supreme Court in early 2019, and arguments were still ongoing by September.
Beyond legal and technical debates, the timing of the amendment — introduced on the second-last day of the last session before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections — fuelled political controversy. The speed of passage (less than 48 hours) and the lack of prior public consultation or referral to a standing committee led many commentators to view it as an election-eve measure aimed at assuaging upper-caste discontent after the BJP’s losses in Hindi-heartland states in December 2018, where the issue of “general-category poverty” had been vocally raised.
Yet perhaps the most fundamental critique transcended the specifics of the EWS quota itself. In an economy generating far fewer formal jobs than required by its growing workforce, reservation — whatever its percentage — was increasingly seen as a zero-sum redistribution of scarce opportunities rather than an expansion of the pie. Official data on unemployment was sparse in 2019 (the last published NSSO periodic labour force survey was for 2011–12), but leaked findings of the 2017–18 PLFS reportedly showed unemployment at a 45-year high of 6.1%. Independent think-tanks such as the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) estimated open unemployment at 7–8% and youth unemployment far higher. Against this backdrop, creating new reservation silos risked intensifying inter-group competition without addressing the root scarcity of quality jobs and educational seats.
By September 2019, implementation of the EWS quota had begun in central government jobs and central educational institutions for the 2019–20 academic year. Several states (including Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, and Karnataka) announced their intention to implement the 10% quota in state services and institutions, while others awaited clarity on matching legislation. Income and asset certificates were being issued by tehsildars and district magistrates, and early trends suggested a rush among general-category candidates to obtain them.
As India marked eight months since the amendment, the EWS reservation stood as a landmark yet contested experiment. It represented the first explicit acknowledgment by the state that economic disadvantage could, under certain conditions, justify reservation even in the absence of identifiable social backwardness. At the same time, its broad eligibility criteria, uncertain constitutional fate, and inability to address job scarcity left many questioning whether it constituted meaningful social justice or merely symbolic politics.
The larger lesson emerging in 2019 was that reservation policy, once conceived as a time-bound tool to remedy historical injustice, had gradually morphed into a primary instrument of distributive politics in a resource-constrained democracy. Until the economy generated significantly more opportunities — in both quantity and quality — any rearrangement of reservation percentages, however well-intentioned, would remain a rearrangement of deck chairs on a ship still searching for more lifeboats.
The debate was far from settled. The Supreme Court hearings, state-level implementations, and the actual on-ground impact in admissions and recruitments over the coming years would ultimately determine whether the 10% EWS quota became a genuine equaliser or simply another chapter in India’s long and complex history of affirmative action.
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