The people on the opposite sides of the table debated on the issue whether to abolish the reservation policy or continue the old system. The argument also carried the statement that reservation should be implemented on the basis of total income of the family, not on the cast that one belongs to. Based on these talks, the Indian government has come up with a solution and declared that a 10 percent of the total seats in the centrally funded higher education institutions (which include IITs, IIMs, NITs) would stay reserved for the economically weaker section (general category) of the society. The 10 percent reservation quota also includes the implementation of “poor among forwards” in the state funded institutions. Thus, there will be an increase in the total number of seats (25 percent) in the IITs, IIMs, Delhi University, Visva Bharati, JNU and other central/state government institutions.
The proposed act accounts to an increase of 5100 IIT seats, 800 IIM seats, 16000 Delhi University seats, 822 Vishva Bharati Seats, 346 JNU seats. “The reform will take place in 40,000 colleges under 900 universities in India and the reservation process will be commencing from this academic year,” said Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister. The current reservation system accounts for 27 percent reserved seats for OBC, 15 percent for SC and 7.5 percent for the ST groups and after this announcement 10 percent extra seats will be reserved for EWS (economically weaker section).
A candidate will be considered as EWS if s/he matches the following criteria:
1. Annual family income should be less than Rs 8 lakh.
2. If owning agricultural land, it should be less than 5 hectres.
3. If owning home, it should be less than 1,000sq.ft.
4. If having residential plot in notified municipality area, it should be less than 100 yards.
5. If having residential plot in non-notified municipality area, it should be less than 200 yards.
If all goes well, the act will be implemented in the 2019-2020 academic session and the government is also playing its part in trying to implement the EWS quota in private and standalone institutions.
