Gujarat High Court has not passed order scrapping reservations

By: Vivek J
July 6 2023

Share Article:

Context 

Some social media posts have claimed that the Gujarat High Court has ordered to abolish the reservation system in one of its verdicts. Such posts written in Kannada can be found on Twitter and Facebook. When translated into English, one such post reads, “A historic verdict by the Gujarat High Court: Gujarat became the first State in the country to completely abolish reservation in government jobs and all forms of education.” Archives of such posts can be seen here and here. 

However, such claims are incorrect as there has been no such verdict by the Gujarat High Court. 

In Fact

Scrapping the reservation system is not listed in any recent verdicts by the Gujarat High Court. Further, we looked for credible news reports and official government notifications and did not find any reports of such verdicts either. 

By conducting multiple keyword searches, we found reports of the Gujarat High Court quashing the state government's ordinance to include a ten percent Economically Weak Section (EWS) quota along with the existing reservation system for jobs and appointments in 2016. 

However, this EWS quota was later introduced at the central level through a law passed in January 2019. A law to include a ten percent EWS quota in the list of existing quotas was passed by the parliament as a constitutional amendment.

Though this amendment was later challenged, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court ruled 3:2 in favor of the law and upheld its validity in 2022. Therefore, reservation continues to be in place as a central law.

No other news reports or official publications indicate that the reservation system was scrapped in the state of Gujarat. On Gujarat High Court’s website, we found a recent advertisement numbered “RC/1434/2022(II),” inviting applications for the “Centralized recruitment to the post of assistant for the subordinate courts in the State of Gujarat.” 

This recruitment advertisement clearly shows how many vacancies are available to each category of people in accordance with the reservation system. It also shows that some vacancies are available to people in the EWS category. Therefore, it is clear that the reservation system is still in place and has not been scrapped. 

We also found similar claims in Hindi and English. The Logical Indian debunked similar claims in 2021. 

The Verdict

Social media posts claiming that the Gujarat High Court has scrapped the reservation system have not provided any supporting evidence. There are no credible news reports or official statements on the matter. According to the latest information, institutions, including the Gujarat High Court are following the reservation system for recruitment. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.