Affirmative action occupies a central place in India’s constitutional project of transforming formal equality into substantive equality. The Constitution was framed against a social order marked by caste-based exclusion, educational deprivation and unequal access to public institutions. Reservation therefore emerged not as a measure of charity but as a constitutional instrument for correcting structural disadvantage and securing meaningful participation in public life. Yet the persistence of reservation also raises a difficult constitutional question: how should a remedial measure respond when its benefits become concentrated within relatively advanced sections of the beneficiary communities while substantial sections remain under-represented?
This paper does not advocate the abolition of affirmative action. It argues instead for its recalibration through evidence-based review, intra-group differentiation and safeguards against inter-generational concentration of benefits. It proposes a normative model described as ‘One Time, One Family Reservation’, under which specified transformative benefits of reservation would ordinarily be treated as exhausted for a family after a defined first-generation benefit, subject to carefully designed exceptions and constitutional safeguards. The proposal is not presented as existing law; it is advanced as a policy model requiring legislative design, empirical validation and judicial scrutiny.
The paper examines Articles 14, 15 and 16, together with the limited but instructive history of Article 334, and analyses the evolution of Supreme Court jurisprudence from M.R. Balaji and Indra Sawhney to M. Nagaraj, Jarnail Singh, Janhit Abhiyan and State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh. Particular attention is given to the constitutional significance of the creamy-layer principle, the permissibility of sub-classification within reserved categories, the concentration of benefits identified in the material associated with the Justice G. Rohini Commission, and the competing claims of equality of opportunity and substantive equality. The paper concludes that periodic constitutional audits, transparent data, sub-classification where constitutionally permissible, and a carefully regulated first-generation priority mechanism can make affirmative action more targeted without abandoning its transformative purpose.