On Tuesday, the Supreme Court instructed to fill the vacant seats under 27% OBC quota in all central educational institutions (CEIs) by the end of October, which has actually given another chance to the general category students, who could not take admission in the premier institutes like the IMM, since they were away just by a single point. 

While Solicitor General G E Vahanvati said that filling the vacant seats in case of spread out implementation of the 27% OBC quota could cause a problem and tried hard to explain the HRD ministry's confusion in front of a constitution bench comprising Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan and Justices Arijit Pasayat, C K Thakker, R V Raveendran and Dalveer Bhandari, it seemed that there was no confusion in the minds of the judges, since it was well confirmed by senior advocate K K Venugopal who appeared for petitioner educationist P V Indiresan. 

The judges were quite clear with their decisions and demanded the convertion of all the vacant seats into general category. 

The SG was questioned by the bench, "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?"

The banch also said, "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."

When the SG felt that it was of no use to convince the bench, since they were quite firm on their decision, it said, "The government would not press further once the Bench has clarified the position leaving no room for confusion."
  
Two SC judges had in their common judgment directed that the cut-off for OBC students should not go below 5% of the cut-off for general category, while a third judge had ordered it should not be more than 10%, so that standards of the institutes could be maintained and not to make merit a casualty.