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The Supreme Court recently held that the Punjab and Haryana High Court had committed a grave error in issuing a writ of mandamus and directing the State Government to provide for 3% reservation/quota for sports persons, instead of 1% as provided by the State Government.

"A conscious policy decision was taken by the State Government to provide for 1% reservation/quota for sports persons. A specific order dated 25.07.2019 was also issued by the State Government. Therefore, the High Court has exceeded its jurisdiction while issuing a writ of mandamus directing the State to provide a particular percentage of reservation for sports persons, namely, in the present case, 3% reservation instead of 1% provided by the State Government, while exercising powers under Article 226 of the Constitution of India....", held a bench of Justices MR Shah and BV Nagarathna.

With this view, the bench went on to quash the direction issued by the High Court directing to provide for a sports quota of 3% in Government Medical/Dental Colleges in the State of Punjab by observing that no writ of mandamus could have been issued by the High Court.

The top court thus allowed an appeal filed by the State of Punjab and set aside the impugned judgment wherein the High Court had directed the state government to issue fresh notification providing for 1% reservation/quota for children/grand children of terrorist affected persons/Sikh riots affected persons in all private unaided non-minority Medical/Dental institutions in the State of Punjab.

In the impugned order, the High Court had clarified that the said reservation/quota shall apply to management quota seats as well and had further directed that the fresh notification shall also provide for a sports quota of 3% in Government Medical/Dental Colleges.

The top court noted that as far as the direction to the State to provide for 3% reservation for sports persons, instead of 1% provided by the State was concerned, it appeared from the impugned judgment and order passed by the High Court that it had issued the said direction considering the Sports Policy, 2018.

It was noted that as per clause 8.11(v) of the said policy, 3% reservation for sports persons had been provided, but clause 10 permitted any other department to have specific policy providing for reservation for sports persons other than 3%.

Therefore, a question was posed for the court's consideration, i.e., whether the State Government’s action taking a policy decision to prescribe a particular percentage of reservation/quota for a particular category of persons, can be interfered with by issuance of a writ of mandamus?

While relying on its decision in Gulshan Prakash (Dr.) and others v. State of Haryana and others, the court noted that there cannot be any mandamus by the Court to provide for a reservation for a particular community.

In the said case before the Court, the State of Haryana did not provide any reservation for SC/ST/backward community at the postgraduate level. A conscious decision was taken by the State of Haryana not to provide for reservation at the postgraduate level. The same was challenged and the Court observed that there cannot be any mandamus by the Court as claimed.

"In the aforesaid decision, it was further observed and held that Article 15(4) of the Constitution is an enabling provision and the State Government is the best Judge to grant reservation for SC/ST/backward categories at postgraduate level. Any policy and the decision of the State not to make any provision for reservation at postgraduate level suffers from no infirmity. It was further observed that every State can take its own decision with regard to reservation depending on various factors...", the bench noted.

Cause Title: The State of Punjab v. Anshika Goyal and others