Read below the Judgement - it may help u, if ur job category ( class) and age may match the relaxation provided to govt. employees.
New Delhi, Sept. 18: The salary of a public sector undertaking employee should not be taken into account while deciding whether his children are ruled out of OBC reservation by the creamy layer clause, Madras High Court has ruled, ending longstanding confusion.
The high court has rejected a central government clarification of 2004 that allowed low and middle-ranking PSU staff's salary to be counted while determining their possible creamy layer status while exempting government staff of similar rank.
Holders of constitutional posts and senior government officials - those recruited as Class I employees (such as IAS, IPS or Isro scientist) and those promoted to Class I before they turned 40 - automatically fall within the creamy layer.
In January this year, the Central Administrative Tribunal, Chennai, had ruled that the exemption the 2004 clarification gave to government employees should be extended to PSU employees too. The high court bench of Justices Huluvadi G. Ramesh and G. Jayachandran upheld the ruling on August 31.
The judgment is expected to provide relief to about 50 candidates who cleared the civil services exam in the past two years but have not yet been allotted posts because of confusion over the creamy layer calculation. These candidates' parents are PSU employees.
Reservation expert P.S. Krishnan said the children of lower-rung private sector employees too could move court, citing the Madras High Court order, to seek relief.
Candidates from the Other Backward Classes are eligible for 27 per cent reservation in government jobs and higher education seats unless ruled out by the income cut-off for the creamy layer, raised recently from Rs 6 lakh a year to Rs 8 lakh a year.
When the job reservations began in 1993, the Centre declared that the parents' income from their government salaries (for middle and lower-rung employees) or agricultural land would not count while deciding their creamy layer status. In 2001, the Supreme Court reiterated this.
This effectively meant that the creamy layer was made up mostly of businessmen, professionals like lawyers and doctors and middle and high-level employees of private firms.
As for PSU staff, the government had said the exemption would apply to them too once a criterion of equivalence was worked out between their positions and those of government employees (to leave out the senior PSU officers).
This equivalence was never worked out but the PSUs kept issuing yearly certificates to their staff declaring whether the posts held by them fell in Class I or Class II. The government continued to accept these certificates till 2016, giving the exemption to Class II staff and those promoted to Class I after the age of 40, despite the 2004 clarification.
But last year, the government suddenly invoked the 2004 clarification to reject about 25 candidates who had cleared the civil services exam, refusing to accept the certificates issued by the PSUs to their parents. This year too, two dozen successful candidates were kept waiting.
Some of the candidates approached the Chennai tribunal, whose judgment the Centre challenged in Madras High Court.
K.S. Dhatwalia, spokesperson for the Union department of personnel and training, has not responded to an email from The Telegraph seeking the government's reaction to the high court judgment.
The Union cabinet recently decided to work out the equivalence between government and PSU posts.