West Bengal Rolls Back OBC Quota to 7% After High Court Strikes Down Post-2010 Expansions

The West Bengal Assembly on Monday passed two bills that reduce the reservation for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) from 17% to 7% and cut the list of recognised sub-castes from 179 to 66. The legislation follows a May 2024 order of the Calcutta High Court that invalidated all OBC certificates issued after 2010, ruling that religion had been the sole criterion for granting OBC status to 77 communities.

The changes effectively reverse a two-decade trend of expanding OBC quotas that began under the Left Front government. In 1993, when OBC reservation was first introduced in the state, the list contained 66 sub-castes — 54 Hindu and 12 Muslim. But ahead of the 2011 assembly elections, the then Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee issued seven executive orders between March and September 2010, adding 42 new classes as OBCs, 41 of them Muslim. This raised the reservation from 7% to 17%, with 10% earmarked for a new category called OBC-A (mostly Muslims) and 7% for OBC-B.

After the Trinamool Congress came to power in 2011, the Mamata Banerjee government further expanded the list in 2012, adding more Muslim sub-castes and bringing the total to 179. The state government cited socio-economic surveys conducted by the West Bengal Commission for Backward Classes, but critics questioned the methodology and alleged that the surveys lacked empirical rigour and failed to apply the creamy layer principle.

The Calcutta High Court, in its May 22, 2024 order, noted that the 2012 legislation excluded the Commission's role in identifying new OBCs and that religion appeared to be the sole criterion for granting OBC status. The bench of Justices Tapabrata Chakraborty and Rajashekhar Mantha described the state's actions as a “fraud on the Constitutional power of the State.” The court, however, protected those already in service or who had availed of reservation benefits.

Following the BJP's victory in the 2026 state elections, the new government moved to comply with the court order. The two bills passed on Monday — the West Bengal Backward Classes (Other than Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes) Reservation of Vacancies in Services and Posts (Amendment) Bill, 2026, and the West Bengal Commission for Backward Classes (Amendment) Bill, 2026 — restore the pre-2010 list of 66 sub-castes and reduce the reservation quota to 7%. The previous TMC government had resisted the court order, with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee declaring she would not accept it and would continue the 17% quota.

The reversal marks a significant shift in West Bengal's OBC policy, which for years had been a politically charged issue. The debate now moves to the adequacy of the data used to identify backward communities and the need to ensure that constitutional safeguards are applied without religious or political bias.