Affirmative Action in India: A Market Design Approach with Historical and Legal Perspective
Abstract:
This paper examines India’s affirmative action program through the lens of market design, focusing on a fundamental conflict between two landmark Supreme Court rulings. The 1992 Indra Sawhney decision established three principles governing seat allocation—the over-and-above principle, within-category fairness, and quota-filling subject to eligibility—which together uniquely characterize the assignment rule used in India for decades. The 2008 Ashoka Kumar Thakur ruling mandated an OBC eligibility cutoff tied to the open-category cutoff score and recommended converting unfilled OBC seats into open-category positions. We demonstrate that these two judgments are mathematically incompatible: no assignment rule can simultaneously satisfy all resulting axioms. To resolve this, we propose a family of assignment rules that accommodate soft OBC reservations and show that the Forward Transfer rule merit-dominates all others in this family. An alternative reinterpretation of the cutoff policy yields an even more meritorious assignment rule, offering a practically implementable resolution to the legal tension.
