Recently, the bench comprising Justices Aniruddha Bose and Sudhanshu Dhulia while considering an appeal filed by a teacher's training institute challenging the 75% domicile reservation in B.Ed seats, the Court ask the State of Madhya Pradesh to review its decision to have 75% domicile reservation in B.Ed seats.  

"We make it clear that though reservation in favour of residents is permissible, yet reservation to the extent of 75% of the total seats makes it a wholesale reservation, which has been held in Pradeep Jain to be unconstitutional and violative of Article 14 of the Constitution of India", the bench stated.

In the said matter, an appellant in his application pointed out that most of the domicile quota seats were lying vacant and this created hardship in running the institute.

Further mentioned, in the 2021-22 academic year, only 4 seats out of the 75 state quota seats got filled, while the 25% "outsider" seats were totally filled. In the 2022-2023 academic year, 73 out of the 75 domicile seats were vacant.

During the hearing, the Court observed

"Though the State is within its right to reserve seats for its own residents, but while doing so, it must keep the ground realities in mind. Keeping 75% of the seats reserved for the residents of Madhya Pradesh is too high a percentage, and as the figures for the last two years indicate, it is also not serving any purpose".

Regarding the B.ed Seats, the Court said,

 "We should not lose sight of this vital fact when we are dealing with the reservations based on residence in other fields of education, as we are doing presently. Whether the justifiable factors of ‘State interest’ and the claim for the backwardness of the State or any other factors which were relevant factors for residence reservations in medical education, would be equally relevant in other fields of education or other professional courses is still to be determined."

Since the academic year of 2022-23 has begun, the Court refrained from interfering with the quota, but directed the State to "re-appreciate this entire aspect".

Case : Veena Vadini Teachers Training Institute v. State of Madhya Pradesh and ors