Subhashish Panigrahi / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Cropped.
The Supreme Court on Friday refused the Centre a long deferral of its March ruling on how the OBC creamy layer is decided, and said the same principle will govern service allocation for OBC candidates selected in the Civil Services Examination 2025.
A bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and R. Mahadevan was dealing with the Centre's plea after the March 11 judgment held that creamy-layer status cannot rest on parental income alone. The Centre had sought about two years to build post-equivalence systems and asked that completed selections not be reopened. The court found no convincing reason for that long pause. It extended the earlier six-month compliance window by eight weeks.
On CSE 2025, the bench was clear: allocation of services is still pending, so the creamy-layer reading from March will apply to those OBC candidates. It also drew a hard line the other way. Concluded appointments, seniority and past selections are not to be reopened merely because the legal principle has been clarified. Relief in the original matter remains tied to parties and intervenors before the court, even though the interpretation binds as precedent.
The fight stretches back to a 1993 office memorandum and a 2004 clarification on salary income. Candidates argued that salary alone had wrongly pushed them into the creamy layer. High courts and the Central Administrative Tribunal had granted relief in several cases; the Centre challenged that line.
For this year's batch, the practical effect is a shorter clock for the government and a live stake in how equivalence of posts is assessed before services are allotted. For earlier batches whose appointments are closed, Friday's order is not a licence to reopen the past.
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