Ex-CJI Gavai on backing income limit in reservation for SCs: ‘I was criticised by my
Ex-CJI Gavai on backing income limit in reservation for SCs: ‘I was criticised by my community’
M.U.H
07/12/202528
Former Chief Justice of India BR Gavai has said he has been "widely criticised" by people from his own community for his judgement that the “creamy layer” principle be applied to reservation for the Scheduled Castes too. Creamy layer refers to people who are above a certain income bracket — ₹8 lakh per annum for Other Backward Classes — and thus excluded from quota benefits.
Gavai said he was accused of “taking benefits of reservation himself to become a Supreme Court judge” yet advocating the exclusion of those who have advanced economically while being members of the backward community. “But these people did not even know that there is no reservation for the constitutional office of High Court or Supreme Court judge,” Gavai, who retired as CJI recently said.
Gavai became only the second Dalit CJI in May 2025 — the first was Justice KG Balakrishnan — and served a short tenure until November 2025.
He was delivering a lecture on ‘Role of Affirmative Action in Promoting Equal Opportunity’ at Mumbai University on Saturday, news agency PTI reported.
"I have travelled across the country, across the world. I have seen many people belonging to the Scheduled Caste becoming chief secretary or director general of police or ambassadors and high commissioners," he said.
“Can applying the same yardstick to the son of a chief justice of India or chief secretary and the son of a labourer who has studied in a gram panchayat school satisfy the test of equality as enshrined in the Constitution?” Gavai remarked.
Paying tributes to Dr BR Ambedkar on his death anniversary, Gavai said the iconic leader was the architect not only of the Indian Constitution but also of the affirmative action enshrined in it.
“Babasaheb, in so far affirmative action is concerned, was of the view that it is like providing a cycle to those who are lagging behind… Suppose somebody is at tenth kilometre and somebody at zero, he (the latter) should be provided a cycle, so that he reaches faster till the tenth kilometre. From there, he joins the person who is already there and walks along with him,” the former judge said.
"Did he (Ambedkar) think that the person should not leave the cycle and carry forward and thereby ask the people who are at zero kilometre to continue to be there?" he asked, as per the PTI report.
“In my view, that was not the vision of social and economic justice as contemplated by Babasaheb Ambedkar.” He said Ambedkar wanted to bring social and economic justice “in the real sense and not in a formal sense”.
He, however, emphasised that in the last 75 years "no doubt affirmative action has played a positive role".
What is the SC creamy layer judgment by Gavai?
In August 2024, Justice Gavai as part of a Supreme Court bench called for exclusion of the creamy layer within the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) from the benefits of reservation policies, so as to ensure that the benefits of affirmative action reach those who are genuinely in need, rather than those who have already transcended their social disadvantages.
The Supreme Court has, in a nine-judge bench decision in the Indra Sawhney case (1992), had confined this principle to the OBCs, explicitly stating that it had “no relevance in the case of SCs and STs".
However, Justice Gavai challenged this long-held position in 2024. “When the nine-judge bench in Indra Sawhney held that applicability of such a test insofar as Other Backward Classes are concerned would advance equality as enshrined in the Constitution, then why such a test should not also be made applicable to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes,” he wondered.
His concurring opinion was delivered as part of a broader ruling that affirmed sub-classification within the SC/STs.
Governments have to make further rules to implement it.
The judge’s opinion was supported by the then CJI Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud, and justices Vikram Nath, Pankaj Mithal, Manoj Misra and Satish Chandra Sharma.
Justice Gavai, in his 281-page judgment, analysed the stark disparities within SC/ST communities, particularly between urban and rural populations. The judge asserted that treating these two groups as equals under the reservation policy would “obliterate the equality principle enshrined in the Constitution.”
