HC stays gov resolution asking minority institutions to enforce quotas in FYJC admissions

MUMBAI: Bombay HC stayed Maharashtra's resolution mandating reservations for SC/ST and OBC in minority colleges, stating it violates minority rights.

MUMBAI: The Bombay high court on Thursday stayed a resolution issued by the Maharashtra government on May 6, which said that minority educational institutes must have reservation for Scheduled Castes/Schedule Tribes (SC/ST) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in first year junior college (FYJC) admissions.

HC stays gov resolution asking minority institutions to enforce quotas in FYJC admissions

Stating that social reservation should not be applicable to any seat in a minority educational institution, a division bench of justices M S Karnik and N R Borkar stayed the resolution and asked the state to update the FYJC admission portal. The court asked the state to respond in four weeks and scheduled the next hearing on August 6.

The order follows petitions filed by Solapur’s APD Jain Pathashala, a minority institution that runs the Walchand College of Arts and Science and the Hirachand Nemchand College of Commerce in Mumbai, and another petition by the Maharashtra Association of Minority Educational Institutions.

Senior advocate Milind Sathe, represented the petitioners, and said that according to the Constitution of India, minority educational institutes, both aided or unaided, need not have reservations for socially and educationally backward classes. He added that a similar government resolution issued in 2019 was also withdrawn after it was challenged in the court.

The court on Wednesday had asked government pleader Neha Bhide to check whether the government was willing to drop minority institutions from the scope of the resolution.

Bhide on Thursday told the court that she had not received any instructions from the government to change the resolution. She added that the resolution did not violate the Indian Constitution and said, “It is only if the seats remain unfilled and are surrendered that the social reservation comes into place.”

The high court had, on Wednesday, questioned the resolution. The court had said that this could just be a mistake by the government for which a correction can be issued, and that an order from the court was not necessary when it came to making such corrections.

The Maharashtra Association of Minority Educational Institutions (MAMEI) had raised objections about the FYJC admission process for the academic year 2025-26 and said that minority colleges until recently followed a fixed seat distribution of 50% for minority quota, 10% for in-house students, 5% for management quota, and 35% for the rest, including the sports quota and ex-servicemen quota.

This year, the government changed the rules for admissions to minority institutions and imposed a reservation for SC/STs and OBCs on the 35% of seats which were in the open category. MAMEI said that the previous reservation structure was legally protected and upheld by the high court and the Supreme Court, and added that the latter had earlier dismissed a petition by the state which challenged the autonomy of minority institutions.