Mandal Commission

The Mandal Commission, formally the Second Backward Classes Commission, was constituted on 1 January 1979 by the Janata Party government of Prime Minister Morarji Desai under Article 340 of the Constitution, which empowers the President to appoint a commission to investigate the conditions of socially and educationally backward classes. It was chaired by Bindheshwari Prasad Mandal, a former Chief Minister of Bihar, and followed the largely shelved First Backward Classes Commission (the Kaka Kalelkar Commission, 1953–55). The Mandal Commission submitted its report in December 1980, identifying 3,743 castes and communities as Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and estimating them at roughly 52% of India's population.

The Commission's central recommendation was 27% reservation in central government jobs and public-sector undertakings for OBCs, a figure deliberately kept so that total reservations (including the 22.5% for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes) would not breach the 50% ceiling indicated in M. R. Balaji v. State of Mysore (1963). To identify backwardness it devised eleven indicators grouped under social, educational and economic criteria, weighting social indicators most heavily, thereby treating caste as the primary—though not sole—marker of backwardness. The report also recommended reservation in educational institutions and structural land and credit reforms, most of which remained unimplemented.

The report lay dormant until 7 August 1990, when Prime Minister V. P. Singh announced its implementation, triggering widespread anti-Mandal agitation, including the self-immolation of student Rajeev Goswami in Delhi. The matter was settled in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992), the Mandal case, where a nine-judge Supreme Court bench upheld the 27% OBC quota but introduced the "creamy layer" exclusion, capped total reservation at 50%, barred reservation in promotions, and held that backwardness must be social and not solely economic. The creamy-layer principle was operationalised through the Department of Personnel and Training's 1993 office memorandum. Subsequent developments built on Mandal: the 93rd Constitutional Amendment (2005) inserting Article 15(5) enabled OBC reservation in educational institutions, upheld in Ashoka Kumar Thakur v. Union of India (2008); the 102nd Amendment (2018) gave constitutional status to the National Commission for Backward Classes under Article 338B; and the 105th Amendment (2021) restored states' power to prepare their own OBC lists after the Maratha reservation case (Jaishri Patil, 2021).

For the UPSC examination the Mandal Commission is a high-yield topic spanning General Studies Paper I (Indian Society—social empowerment, caste, the question of reservations) and Paper II (Polity—Articles 15, 16, 340, the creamy layer, and the Indra Sawhney doctrine), as well as Post-Independence history covering the Mandal–Mandir politics of 1990 and the consequent realignment of party systems and OBC mobilisation. Typical questions ask candidates to evaluate caste versus economic criteria for backwardness, discuss the 50% ceiling and its erosion by the 10% Economically Weaker Sections quota (Janhit Abhiyan, 2022), or analyse Mandal's impact on social justice and electoral politics. Essay and ethics papers frequently invoke it when debating equality of opportunity against substantive equality.