The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that reservation for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward classes would not apply if the government was filling a single post in a cadre.
However, it clarified that if aperson from the reserved category was already in government employment and eligible to be selected to the single post through departmental promotion, then appointing him to the single post would not be vitiated.
Referring to two earlier judgments, a bench of Justice Dipak Misra and Justice P C Pant said, “It is eminently explicit that reservation for a single post in a cadre will keep the general members of the public in total exclusion and the question of reservation will arise when there is plurality of posts in the cadre.“
The bench married the two earlier orders to enunciate that if a person from reserved category , already employed with the government, was appointed to the single post through due process of pro motion, it would not fall foul of an earlier Constitution bench judgment which barred reservation for single posts.
The Constitution bench in the `Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh vs Faculty Association' case in 1998 had held that “in a single post cadre, reservation at any point of time on account of rotation of roster is bound to bring about a situation where such a single post in the cadre will be kept reserved exclusively for the members of backward classes and in total exclusion of the general members of the public“.
“Such total exclusion of general members of the public and cent per cent reservation for the backward classes is not permissible within the constitutional framework,“ it had said.
A year later, in 1999, the SC in Punjab vs R N Bhatnagar had said that when posts in a cadre were to be filled from two sources -departmental promotion and direct recruitment -once both entered a common cadre, their birthmarks disappeared and they got completely integrated in the common cadre.
