After more than five years of its formation, the commission for the sub-categorisation of the Other Backward Classes (OBC) is now in the final stages of finishing its task of coming up with a formula to further classify the nearly 3,000 caste groups and preparing a report on it, according to multiple officials aware of the developments.
The five-member commission, headed by Justice G. Rohini (retd), was constituted in October 2017 and was initially given 12 weeks to submit its report to the President of India. Since then, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has extended the deadline more than 10 times, first citing the additional time required by the commission to gather information and data and then the pandemic.
The latest deadline for the commission has been set for January 31, 2023. This came ahead of the Assembly election in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh.
The commission has been having a back-and-forth with the Union government over the past few years and is finalising the “sensitive work” of distributing quotas within the OBC groups, multiple members told The Hindu. “We have had to undertake a monumental task over the past few years and expect to submit the entire report before the next deadline expires,” one of them added.
In addition to recommending a formula that distributed the quota available to OBCs equitably among the caste groups, the commission was also tasked with identifying which caste groups would get what share of the 27% reservation pie.
For this, the commission has undertaken a large-scale exercise to determine which of the caste groups are the dominant ones and which are routinely pushed out of getting benefits.
According to the sources, the considerations made by the commission included dividing up the nearly 3,000 caste groups into four broad categories, with the maximum share available to those that are historically crowded out by the dominant groups. Officials have expressed concerns over how this report should be made public, given that no matter which caste groups are classified for the least amount of reservation, some backlash will be expected.
