Rohini Commission (Sub-categorisation of OBCs)

The Rohini Commission is a commission constituted by the Government of India on 2 October 2017 under Article 340 of the Constitution, which empowers the President to appoint a commission to investigate the conditions of socially and educationally backward classes. Formally titled the Commission to Examine Sub-categorisation of Other Backward Classes, it was chaired by Justice G. Rohini, former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court. Its creation responded to a long-standing grievance that the benefits of the 27 per cent Other Backward Classes (OBC) reservation in central government jobs and educational institutions — a quota traced to the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations following the Supreme Court's 1992 ruling in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India — had been captured disproportionately by a few dominant and politically organised OBC communities, leaving hundreds of smaller, more backward castes underrepresented.

The Commission's terms of reference, set out in the original notification, directed it to three tasks: to examine the extent of inequitable distribution of reservation benefits among the castes and communities listed in the Central List of OBCs; to work out the mechanism, criteria, norms and parameters for sub-categorisation within those classes; and to identify and classify the respective castes, sub-castes and communities into their appropriate sub-categories. A fourth term of reference, added by an amendment notified on 22 January 2020, asked the Commission to study the entries in the Central List of OBCs and recommend correction of any repetitions, ambiguities, inconsistencies and errors of spelling or transcription. The methodology rested on analysing data on the share of representation each OBC community had secured in central jobs and admissions over a defined reference period.

In practical operation the Commission sought to divide the roughly 2,650 castes in the Central List into discrete sub-groups, each allotted a fixed share of the 27 per cent quota so that benefits would flow to communities historically left behind. Early reporting on its analysis indicated a striking concentration: that a small fraction of OBC castes had cornered the majority of benefits while a large number had received negligible or no representation. To populate its calculations the Commission requested caste-wise data from central departments, public-sector undertakings, banks and universities, and at one stage proposed a dedicated all-India survey of OBC population figures, given the absence of an enumerated OBC census since 1931. The persistent unavailability of robust, disaggregated population data became one of the principal reasons the Commission's work extended over years rather than the months originally envisaged.

The Commission's tenure was extended repeatedly by the Union Cabinet — fourteen extensions in all — pushing its deadline from an initial twelve weeks in 2017 through successive years. Justice Rohini submitted the final report to President Droupadi Murmu on 31 July 2023, nearly six years after the body's constitution. The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment served as the nodal ministry throughout. As of the report's submission its contents had not been made public, and the government had not tabled implementing legislation or executive orders to give effect to the recommended sub-categories, leaving the operational outcome pending political and legal deliberation in New Delhi.

Sub-categorisation of OBCs must be distinguished from adjacent concepts. It differs from the creamy layer exclusion, an income-and-status ceiling that disqualifies wealthier OBC individuals from reservation, introduced in Indra Sawhney and operationalised through Office Memoranda of the Department of Personnel and Training; the creamy layer filters individuals out, whereas sub-categorisation redistributes the quota among castes. It is also distinct from the work of the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC), which since the 102nd Constitutional Amendment of 2018 is a constitutional body under Article 338B advising on inclusion and exclusion from the Central List, rather than on internal apportionment. Several states — Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Haryana, West Bengal and Jharkhand — had already adopted their own forms of OBC sub-categorisation for state-level reservations before the central exercise.

The proposal carries notable controversies and legal complexity. The constitutional permissibility of sub-classification within reserved categories was contested for years, but the Supreme Court's seven-judge Constitution Bench in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (1 August 2024) upheld the power of states to sub-classify Scheduled Castes for reservation, overruling the earlier E. V. Chinnaiah (2004) position; that reasoning lends weight to OBC sub-categorisation, though the two categories rest on different constitutional articles. Critics warn that without a contemporary caste census the redistribution rests on incomplete data, and dominant OBC communities have politically resisted any reapportionment that would dilute their share. The absence of OBC enumeration in the 2011 Socio-Economic Caste Census's usable public form remains a recurring obstacle.

For the working practitioner — the policy researcher, desk officer or UPSC aspirant — the Rohini Commission is significant as the central government's most ambitious attempt to address intra-category inequity in India's reservation architecture, and as a live test of whether affirmative action can be calibrated caste by caste rather than category by category. Its eventual implementation would reshape recruitment to central services, admissions to centrally funded institutions, and the political arithmetic of OBC mobilisation. Pending publication of the report and any enabling order, the Commission stands as a reference point in debates over social justice, data adequacy, and the constitutional limits of equality under Articles 14, 15(4) and 16(4).