Chhattisgarh has urged the Prime Minister to enlist the amended reservation provisions of the state, which provides for 76% reservation in ninth schedule.
- The 76 per cent reservation breaches the 50 per cent ceiling set by the Supreme Court in the landmark 1992 Indra Sawhney v Union of India verdict.
- However, placing a legislation in the Ninth Schedule shields it from judicial scrutiny.
About Ninth Schedule
- The 9th Schedule contains a list of central and state laws which cannot be challenged in courts.
- Currently, 284 such laws are shielded from judicial review. Most of the laws protected under the Schedule concern agriculture/land issues.
- The Schedule became a part of the Constitution in 1951, when the document was amended for the first time.
- It was created by the new Article 31B, which along with 31A was brought in by the government to protect laws related to agrarian reform and for abolishing the Zamindari system.
- While 31A extends protection to ‘classes’ of laws, 31B shields specific laws or enactments.
- While the Ninth Schedule provides the law with a “safe harbour” from judicial review, the protection is not blanket.
- When the Tamil Nadu law was challenged in 2007 (I R Coelho v State of Tamil Nadu), the Supreme Court ruled in a unanimous nine-judge verdict that while laws placed under Ninth Schedule cannot be challenged on the grounds of violation of fundamental rights, they can be challenged on the ground of violating the basic structure of the Constitution.
- The court clarified that the laws cannot escape the “basic structure” test if inserted into the Ninth Schedule after 1973, as it was in 1973 that the basic structure test was evolved in the Kesavananda Bharati case as the ultimate test to examine the constitutional validity of laws.
