Supreme Court stays 10% EWS quota in Maharashtra PG medical courses

New Delhi: The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Maharashtra cannot implement the 10% quota for the economically weaker sections (EWS) in postgraduate medical courses for 2019-20 academic session at the cost of other categories and stayed a state government notification to this effect.

A bench led by the Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi said that the state cannot even implement the quota at the cost of the general category seats which are filled up on merit. The state should have first increased the seats in its postgraduate courses to accommodate the new EWS category, it said. “It cannot be implemented at the cost of others (categories),” CJI Gogoi said. A vacation bench also clamped a stay on the government notification regarding reserving seats for the EWS category in the state’s PG medical seats.

In a short order, the bench, which included Justice Aniruddha Bose, said that the admission process for this year was already underway when the state decided to implement the EWS quota. Citing a similar ruling in the Maratha reservation case, the bench said that the “modalities of the selection process cannot be changed after initiation of the process”.


While the admission process for PG medical courses started in November 2018, the constitutional amendment granting 10% EWS quota was passed in January this year. The bench said the Maharashtra government enforced the 10% EWS quota for PG medical courses in March.

Staying the notification, the court said that the state should have first increased the seats to enable such reservation for poor candidates. Otherwise, such EWS candidates will take admissions for the time being only to be unseated by the court later, it said. The court, however, permitted the Medical Council of India to increase the seats to set the stage for such reservation.