Reserved But Routed: How Andhra Pradesh's G.O. 102 Quietly Shut OBC, SC, ST Merit Candidates Out of MBBS Seats

The Andhra Pradesh government is facing an unprecedented demand to halt the 2026 MBBS counselling cycle, after the Liberation Congress Party (LCP) alleged that 70 meritorious candidates from reserved categories were denied Open Competition (OC) seats they had earned on merit. According to LCP national president Vijay Kumar G. Srkr, 43 reserved-category candidates in the AU region who scored above the OC cut-off of rank 71,547, and 27 in the SVU region above rank 94,966, were all channelled into their reserved quotas rather than competing in the general pool. The LCP wants G.O. No. 102 withdrawn in favour of the earlier G.O. No. 151, and the counselling restarted.

What G.O. 102 Changed — And Why It Matters

G.O. 102 altered the long-standing convention under which reserved-category candidates who scored above the OC cut-off could opt for either their reserved category seat or compete in the general pool. By mandating that such candidates be allocated only under their reserved category, the order effectively shrank the field of "merit-open" competition and reallocated a finite number of seats in a manner that has triggered an organised political backlash from parents and aspirants.

This is not merely a procedural dispute. In a State where competition for the roughly 5,000-odd MBBS seats annually draws lakhs of applicants, even small changes in seat-allocation rules shift career trajectories for hundreds of families.

The Constitutional Architecture Behind the Quarrel

The dispute sits at the intersection of Article 15(4) and Article 16(4) of the Constitution — provisions inserted by the 42nd Amendment to enable reservation in educational institutions and public employment for socially and educationally backward classes. Post-Mandal, these articles operationalised a politics of compensatory discrimination aimed at correcting centuries of caste-based exclusion.

Yet the Mandal framework has always carried an internal tension: how to balance affirmative uplift with the principle of merit, and how to ensure that reservation benefits flow to genuinely disadvantaged families rather than entrenched elite castes within the OBC fold. The Indra Sawhney judgment attempted to balance this through the creamy-layer principle — but the Andhra Pradesh episode exposes a parallel contradiction: when meritorious reserved-category candidates are forced into their quota instead of being allowed to compete openly, reservation can begin to punish the very excellence it was designed to nurture.

What the Numbers Show

The numbers in the LCP complaint are precise and falsifiable. In the AU region alone, 43 candidates with ranks better than 71,547 — the OC cut-off — were denied OC consideration. In the SVU region, 27 candidates above rank 94,966 faced the same fate. Together, this represents 70 high-performing students whose academic achievement, by the older G.O. 151 rules, would have entitled them to compete in the open pool.

• ▸43 reserved-category candidates in the AU region scored above the OC cut-off of rank 71,547
• ▸27 reserved-category candidates in the SVU region scored above the OC cut-off of rank 94,966
• ▸G.O. 102 routed them exclusively into their reserved categories
• ▸LCP demands a return to G.O. 151 and fresh counselling

Why This Episode Resonates Beyond Andhra Pradesh

The Mandal-era settlement gave India its most consequential instrument of representational justice — the OBC quota of 27% flowing from the Mandal Commission's 1980 report. It transformed Indian polity: parties reoriented their social coalitions, the BJP and Samajwadi Party built new political grammars around backward-class solidarity, and the Mandal-versus-Mandal debate has shaped every major electoral contest since 1990.

But the Andhra Pradesh complaint signals a quieter, technical crisis: as reservation expands numerically and judicially, the internal mechanics of allocation — the order in which a candidate's rank is matched against multiple quotas — can dilute or distort the original social-welfare intent. When a Dalit student with a top rank is denied an open seat so that a general-category student with a lower rank can be accommodated, the optics of social justice invert sharply. The LCP's reading is that G.O. 102 effectively converts merit into a ceiling for reserved-category aspirants.

The Way Forward

The Andhra Pradesh Medicos Parents Association has framed this as a question of right, not charity — meritorious reserved-category candidates are entitled to compete where their rank places them. Any durable solution will require the State to clarify whether the OC quota is a separate pool reserved exclusively for non-reserved-category candidates, or whether it functions, as historically intended, as the merit-floor into which the top reserved-category ranks also flow. Either reading has defensible constitutional logic; the question is which one the State wants to legislate — and whether G.O. 102 actually said what its drafters intended.