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Chandigarh: HC junks Haryana notification on reducing SC seats in Panchkula MC
The Punjab and Haryana HC quashed Haryana's notification reducing SC seats in Panchkula MC from four to three, citing improper data usage.
The Punjab and Haryana high court (HC) has quashed the Haryana government’s 2025 notification, whereby Scheduled Caste (SC) category seats in the Panchkula municipal corporation (MC) House were reduced from four seats to three.
The petition by one Usha Rani and others had challenged the government notification of September 4, 2025, stating that in the last election held for the ‘20’ wards of the elected body, the reservation was carved out based on the Census of 2011, and out of the total ‘20’ seats, ‘four’ seats were reserved for candidates belonging to the SC community. However, even as the geographical territory of the MC has been changed by the government for the upcoming election, and the total number of seats remain the same, the number of the seats reserved for the SC category have been reduced from ‘four’ to ‘three’.
During the hearing, the court found that the government of Haryana used Family Information Data Repository (FIDR) data for deciding the number of reserved category seats and not the Census data.
The government had claimed that there was no malafide intent to reduce the seats belonging to the SC categories.
The court said that on one hand, the state is referring to FIDR for fixation of the total number of seats, which remained unchanged since the previous Census of 2011, while on the other hand, when it came to determining the Scheduled Caste population, and for the purpose of reducing the seats, they referred to only to the 2011 Census.
“It means that the total number of voters belonging to the SC community will be on FIDR, but their reservation will be based on the 2011 Census. On its face, the entire process adopted by the government is contrary to the spirit of Article 243T of the Constitution of India,” it said.
The court set aside the notification observing that “…the reservation could have been applied only and after counting the entire population in the reconstituted municipal limits of Panchkula, based on the Census of 2011, and not on FIDR under the Haryana Parivar Pehchan Act 2021,” it said.
