Abstract
India is home to a comprehensive affirmative action program that reserves a fraction of positions at governmental institutions for various disadvantaged groups. While there is a Supreme Court-endorsed mechanism to implement these reservation policies when all positions are identical, courts have refrained from endorsing explicit mechanisms when positions are heterogeneous. This lacuna has resulted in widespread adoption of unconstitutional mechanisms, countless lawsuits, and inconsistent court rulings. By formulating mandates from the landmark Supreme Court judgment Saurav Yadav vs The State of U.P. (2020) as technical axioms, we show that the 2SMH-DA mechanism is uniquely suited to overcome these challenges.
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© 2024 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
2024
President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
