A question of quota: How to determine who is 'economically weak'

Determining who is 'economically weak' will shape the success of the reservation policy

Martin Luther King Jr’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech became a rallying cry for the world’s oppressed communities demanding equality. More than a decade before that speech, India’s constituent assembly legislated caste-based reservation to lift the historically marginalised. The ambit was expanded in 1992 to cover Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Earlier this week, the Supreme Court upheld another expansion giving a 10 per cent quota to the economically weaker sections (EWS) in the general category.

With the ambit of reservation expanded, computing who qualifies for the benefit has become complicated. A national census could fix the number of Scheduled