The Supreme Court on Tuesday instructed all Central educational institutions (CEIs) to fill the vacant seats in Other Backward Classes category from among the general category candidates by October 31. This comes as a blessing in disguise to the general category students, who had missed admission to premier institutes like IIM by a whisker, as they will get another opportunity to secure a seat in there dream institution.

A five-judge Constitution Bench consisting of Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan and Justices Arijit Pasayat, C.K. Thakker, R.V. Raveendran and Dalveer Bhandari passed this order on an application filed by the former Chennai IIT Director, Professor P.V. Indiresan, requesting that the 432 vacant seats in SC/ST/OBC categories in the IITs be filled by general category candidates. 

The bench asked the SG: "Even if you implement the OBC quota in a staggered manner, how can you carry forward the vacant seats? Admission to each academic year is unique. Where is the question of backlog vacancy for backward classes?" 

"If you carry forward the vacancies, the infrastructure you have created along with the increase in the seats would go waste and that is definitely not the intention of the judgment," it said.