103rd Constitutional Amendment (EWS Reservation, 2019)

The 103rd Constitutional Amendment Act, 2019 introduced a 10% reservation for "Economically Weaker Sections" (EWS) in Central Government educational institutions, private educational institutions (excluding minority institutions), and Central Government employment. It amended Articles 15 and 16 of the Constitution of India to permit reservations based solely on economic criteria. The bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha on January 8, 2019, passed by the Lok Sabha on January 9 by a vote of 323 to 3, passed by the Rajya Sabha on January 10 by a vote of 165 to 7, received presidential assent on January 12, and came into force on January 14, 2019. The eligibility threshold was set at an annual household income below ₹8 lakh, with additional exclusions for households owning more than five acres of agricultural land or property above specified urban and non-urban thresholds. Crucially, citizens already covered under the Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, and Other Backward Class reservation frameworks were explicitly excluded from EWS benefits — raising the total national reservation quota from 49.5% to approximately 59.5%.

The amendment was passed by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the final session of the 16th Lok Sabha, weeks before the 2019 general elections. Critics noted the extraordinary legislative speed — both houses passed the bill within two days — and questioned whether the amendment was designed primarily as an electoral maneuver to consolidate upper-caste votes rather than as a substantive social justice measure. The government framed the policy as addressing economically disadvantaged populations not covered by existing reservation frameworks.

The constitutional validity of the amendment was immediately contested. More than twenty petitions were filed before the Supreme Court, consolidated as Janhit Abhiyan v. Union of India (Writ Petition (C) No. 55/2019). Petitioners — including Janhit Abhiyan, Youth for Equality, the SC/ST Agricultural Research and Education Employees Welfare Association, and the Peoples Party of India (Democratic) — argued that the amendment violated the basic structure of the Constitution: that reservations based purely on economic criteria were impermissible under the Indra Sawhney (1992) precedent, that the explicit exclusion of SC/ST and OBC citizens from EWS benefits violated the equality code of Articles 14–16, and that the amendment breached the 50% reservation ceiling established in Indra Sawhney. On November 7, 2022, a five-judge Constitutional bench upheld the amendment by a 3-2 majority. The majority — Justices Dinesh Maheshwari, Bela M. Trivedi, and J.B. Pardiwala — held that economic criteria alone can justify reservation and that the 50% ceiling under Indra Sawhney applies only to backward-class reservations. The dissent — Justice S.R. Bhat and Chief Justice U.U. Lalit — argued that the exclusion of SC/ST and OBC communities "strikes at the heart of the equality code" and constitutes a violation of the Constitution's basic structure. A review petition was dismissed on May 9, 2023.

From a Dalit and anti-caste perspective, the 103rd Amendment represents a fundamental inversion of constitutional intent. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar designed reservation as a remedy for the structural violence of caste — not for poverty as such. As Soma Mandal, a PhD researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, writing in Round Table India, argues, EWS reservation is an attempt to "End Weaker Section" reservation by channeling social privilege to upper castes through a mechanism originally conceived for the historically marginalized. The income threshold of ₹8 lakh annually encompasses approximately 95% of upper-caste households, making the policy practically coextensive with upper-caste benefit. Journalist Ajaz Ashraf, writing in Newsclick, characterizes the policy as a "counter-revolution" that reverses decades of caste-based affirmative action by displacing the Ambedkarite logic of social discrimination with a de-casteified notion of economic need. Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Jha described the amendment's passage as "midnight robbery," arguing that it effectively shrinks the positions available to SC, ST, and OBC candidates competing in the general category by raising competitive cutoffs, while using the language of equality to benefit those who have never faced structural exclusion on the basis of caste.