As agreed at the meeting of UPA allies yesterday, the government today sent a directive to all Central higher educational institutes, asking them to go ahead with admissions, minus the OBC quotas for the time being.

This follows the Supreme Court stay last month on the implementation of 27 per cent reservation for OBC students from the ensuing academic year. The matter is due to come up for hearing before the court again on May 8 when the government hopes that the stay would be vacated.

But since some institutes like the IIMs have already completed their admission process and were not able to defer the results till a final resolution of the matter, the government decided to allow all institutes to release their admission lists of general and SC/ST categories in accordance with the pre-existing reservation policy.

If the court vacates the stay order and gives the go-ahead for OBC reservation in education, these institutes will then be required to release a separate list of successful OBC candidates according to the new policy which expands the number of seats in the institutes while providing for the reservation of OBCs.

The notification affects all IIMs, IITs, National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and all central universities like BHU, AMU and JNU, among a total of 64 institutes.

Meanwhile, Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh told reporters that the government remained committed to the reservation of OBCs. “We will explore all constitutional and legal mechanisms to ensure that reservations for OBCs in educational institutes is implemented,” he said.