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Prima facie, equal marks must have equal chance for medical admissions, as urged by the practitioner. And neither university based favoured treatment nor satyagraha- induced quota policy can survive the egalitarian attack. To repulse the charge, equality oriented grounds must be made out. Constitutional equality itself is dynamic, flexible, and moulded by the variables of life. For instance, if a region is educationally backward or woefully deficient in medical services, there occurs serious educational and health-service disparity for that human religion which must be redressed by an equality and service minded Welfare State. The purpose of such a policy is to remove the existing inequality and to promote welfare-based equality for the denizens of the backward regions. The specific strategy to ameliorate the unequal societal condition is left to the State, provided it is geared to producing equality in the quality of life of that handicapped area subject, of course, to basic recognition of individual quality and criteria of efficiency.

We must go to the roots of the creed of equality and here the case of State of Kerala v. N. M. Thomas(1) has critical relevance. That decision dealt with the Scheduled Castes and Art. 16 and certain facilities other than reservation. But the core reasoning has crucial significance in all cases of protective discrimination. The process of equalisation and benign discrimination are integral, and not antagonistic, to the principle of equality. In a hierarchical society with an indelible feudal stamp and incurable actual inequality, it is sophistry to argue that progressive measures to eliminate group disabilities and promote collective equality are anathema on the score that every individual has entitlement on pure merit of marks. This narrow 'unsocial' pedantry subverts the seminal essence of equal opportunity even for those who are humble and handicapped. Meritocracy cannot displace equality when the utterly backward masses labour under group disabilities. So we may weave those special facilities into the web of equality which, in an equitable setting, provide for the weak and promote their levelling up so that, in the long run, the community at large may enjoy a general measure of real equal opportunity. So we hold, even apart from Art. 15(3) and (4), that equality is not negated or neglected where special provisions are geared to the larger goal of the disabled getting over their disablement consistently with the general good and individual merit. Indeed, Art. 14 implies all this, in its wider connotation, and has to inform the interpretation of Art. 15.

If equality of opportunity for every person in the country is the constitutional guarantee, a candidate who gets more marks than another is entitled to preference for admission. Merit must be the test when choosing the best, according to this rule of equal chance for equal marks. This proposition has greater importance when we reach the higher levels of education like post-graduate courses. After all, top technological expertise in any vital field like medicine is nation's human asset without which its advance and development will be stunted. The role of high grade skill or special talent may be less at the lesser levels of education, jobs and disciplines of social inconsequence, but more at the higher levels of sophisticated skills and strategic employment. To devalue merit at the summit is to temporise with the country's development in the vital areas of professional expertise. In science and technology and other specialised fields of developmental significance, to relax lazily or easily in regard to exacting standards of performance may be running a grave national risk because in advanced medicine and other critical departments of higher knowledge, crucial to material progress, the people of India should not be denied the best the nation's talent lying latent can produce. If the best potential in these fields is cold-shouldered for populist considerations garbed as reservations, the victims, in the long run, may be the people themselves. Of course, this unrelenting strictness in selecting the best may not be so imperative at other levels where a broad measure of efficiency may be good enough and what is needed is merely to weed out the worthless.

Coming to brasstacks, deviation from equal marks will meet with approval only if the essential conditions set out above are fulfilled. The class which enjoys reservation must be educationally handicapped. The reservation must be geared to getting over the handicap. The rationale of reservation must be in the case of medical students, removal of regional or class inadequacy or like disadvantage. The quantum of reservation should not be excessive or societally injurious measured by the over-all competency of the end-product, viz. degree-holders. A host of variables influence the quantification of the reservation. But one factor deserves great emphasis. The higher the level of the speciality the lesser the role of reservation. Such being the pragmatics and dynamics of social justice and equal rights, let us apply the tests to the case on hand.