New Delhi, April 11: The Supreme Court has adopted graduation as the yardstick to determine which groups should benefit from education quotas, but not fixed it as a ceiling beyond which reservation cannot go.

Graduates from the Other Backward Classes cannot be denied reservation at the postgraduate level, court sources said today. The mistaken idea that OBC reservation did not extend to postgraduate courses — and therefore to the MBA programmes in the IIMs — had been aired in some quarters last night.

The five-judge bench that upheld the constitutional validity of the OBC quota yesterday laid down a simple criterion to determine who is educationally backward. A caste or group merits the label if more than half its adult members are not graduates.

“However, once a student from such a caste graduates with the benefit of OBC reservation, he or she cannot be denied reservation at the postgraduate level,” a source said.

To get into the OBC list, however, a group has to be both educationally backward and socially backward (in terms of the caste hierarchy) — satisfying just one criterion will not do. Using only the caste criterion would have made the quota unconstitutional, the judgment had clarified.

The court had rejected as “untenable” the anti-quota petitioners’ plea to make “10+2” (equivalent to higher secondary or ICSE) the yardstick to determine which groups are educationally backward.

“Although at the time of attaining Independence the basic idea was to improve primary- and secondary-level education… now, after a period of more than 50 years, it is idle to contend that the backward classes shall be determined on the basis of attaining education only to the level of 10+2 stage,” the court said.

“In India, there are a large number of arts, science and professional colleges and in the field of education, it is anachronistic to contend that primary education or secondary education shall be the index for fixing backward class of citizens. We find no force in the contention… and it is only to be rejected.

“If this plea is accepted, it would result in higher education being the privilege of the higher classes only…. It would be a distortion of the concept of social advancement of the downtrodden and the negation of the goal envisaged by the Preamble (to the Constitution),” the judgment said.