No OBC quota in IIMs, AIIMS

K Venugopal, one of India's highly respected lawyers told rediff.com on Thursday, "According to today's judgment, the Indian Institute of Management and All India Institute of Medical Sciences will not have any reservation for Other Backward Classes."

Venugopal appeared in this landmark hearing in the Supreme Court on behalf of the Junior Doctors Association of AIIMS, New Delhi.

Explaining the reason behind it, he said, "Justices Arijit Pasayat, C K Thakker and Dalveer Bhandari has clearly said in their judgment that you ceased to be OBC when you are educated and attain graduation. Test of the OBC is social and educational backwardness. It says "and", that means if you are not educationally backward you are not OBC. The court has accepted the argument that if you are able to graduate you are not entitled to reservation."

"Not only IIMs, but even AIIMS and such other centres of higher learning will not have any OBC reservation," Venugopal added.

While putting the entire judgment in perspective Venugopal said, "This balanced judgment has scaled down the huge volume of OBC to the core level of OBC. This judgment has upheld the economic criteria of 1993 depriving large number of members of OBC from benefiting from reservation. It is a serious setback to the government who wanted to fill up prestigious institutes with OBC quotas. Today's judgment has kept graduation as the 'cut-off' point that will reduce the numbers of beneficiaries of OBC reservation."

"The 1993 criteria to decide 'creamy layer' amongst OBC section says that people with landed property, all government employees above Class II, all OBC families with monthly income of Rs 20,000 (gross annual income of Rs.2.5 lakh and above ) etc. are barred from availing any reservation from now onwards," Venugopal said.

Just enough food to last 2-3 months

The world had just about enough cereal stocks to feed the global population for two to three months. With a crisis looming worldwide, food prices too are far from coming down, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation revealed .The rise in prices of food commodities all over the world will not ease in the short term in view of supply-demand situation,FAO director general Jacques Diouf told reporters after meeting agriculture minister Sharad Pawar.Diouf said the world has 4-5 million tonne of cereals stocks that can feed the global population for only 8-12 weeks.

The world food situation is very serious today with food riots reported from many countries like Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti, Burkina Faso and Senegal. The fear is that this may spread to other countries.World food prices have risen 45% in the last nine months and there are serious shortages of rice, wheat and maize.

The increasing demand from developing countries, particularly in China and India, and diversion of food grains towards production of bio-fuels to rising commodity prices across the world.However, Pawar expressed confidence that India's food situation was comfortable."We have over half a million tonne of food grain surplus than the buffer norms as on April 1," Pawar said.

According to Food Corporation of India, the wheat stock as on April 1 is 5.5 MT against the buffer norm of 4 MT.