Maratha reservation explained: 37.28% below the poverty line, and the 50% ceiling

For forty-six years the Maratha community has been asking the Indian state to classify it as backward. It has supplied thirteen of Maharashtra's nineteen chief ministers while asking.

That is the difficulty in two sentences, and both halves of it are documented. On one side, the Supreme Court's own account of the case against a Maratha quota: the majority of the state legislature belongs to the community, thirteen of nineteen chief ministers came from it, seventeen of the state's twenty-five medical colleges were founded or are owned by Marathas, and the Bombay High Court was handed a list of cooperative sugar factories chaired by them.¹ More than half the MPs Maharashtra sent to Parliament in 2024 were Maratha.²

On the other, the same community measured by the state's own Backward Class Commission. 76.86% of Maratha families live off agriculture or agricultural labour. 37.28% are below the poverty line, against a state average of 24.2%. 85% get by on less than Rs 25,000 a year.³ Of the farmers in Maharashtra who died by suicide, the Gokhale Institute of Economics and Politics found that 40% were Maratha.³

Both sets of numbers come from the same two judgments. Neither set is disputed by anyone serious. Forty-six years of commissions, two Acts of the legislature, a five-judge Constitution Bench and eleven hunger strikes have not settled what to do about a community that runs a state and cannot feed itself.

The answer the Supreme Court gave

For the Marathas, the answer they have asked for since 1981 is a reservation: a fixed share of government jobs and college seats, of the kind India has given to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes. To get it, a community must be certified as socially and educationally backward. That is the whole difficulty, because of the thirteen chief ministers.

On 5 May 2021, refusing them, the Court put it in nine words.

The Marathas are dominant forward class and are in the main stream of National life.

Everything below is how the state got from one of those positions to the other, and back.

Nobody knows how many Marathas there are

Start with the simplest question, because the state cannot answer it either. India counts nobody by caste beyond the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, so every figure for the Maratha share of Maharashtra is an estimate from a survey.

By 2018 there were three such estimates and they did not agree. The state's own Planning Department had surveyed and found 32.14%. The Government of India's socio-economic and caste survey had found 27%. A state commission ran its own sample survey, got a third figure, and published the average of all of them: about 30%.³

Three surveys, three answers, five percentage points apart. Everything that follows rests on that number, because a quota is a share and a share needs a denominator. The state does not have one. It has an average.

Four commissions said no

The demand is recorded as beginning in 1981, when Annasaheb Patil of the Mathadi Labour Union organised a rally in Mumbai, after which the issue lay largely dormant until the 2000s.^4† That account rests on an encyclopedia entry, which is why it carries a mark, and the owner of this archive dates the rally to March 1982 instead. No document held here settles which is right.

What is beyond dispute is the run of refusals. Between 1980 and 2008 the question went to four separate bodies and all four said no.

The Mandal Commission reported on the last day of 1980 and put the Marathas down as a forward Hindu community. Then Justice Khatri's commission, constituted by Maharashtra in 1995, drew a distinction that has shaped every argument since. Kunbi is a cultivator caste already inside the Other Backward Classes, and many Marathas appear in old revenue papers as Kunbi. The commission held by majority that Marathas as such should not be entered on the list as Kunbis, while allowing those already recorded as Kunbi-Maratha to stay.³ A door left ajar, and twenty-eight years later somebody would walk through it.

Then the National Commission for Backward Classes took the question up, and its answer is the one still quoted back at the community.

the National Commission of Backward Class report dated 25th February 2000 categorized Maratha as socially advanced and prestigious community and not only this, the MSBCC (Bapat Commission Report) dated 25 th July 2008 also rejected the demand of Maratha community to be included in the Other Backward Class.

Not socially backward, the National Commission held, but socially advanced and prestigious. Justice Bapat's commission agreed eight years later. Four inquiries, four refusals, twenty-eight years, and by the reasoning of all four the thirteen chief ministers settled it.

What changed

The first serious attempt to overrule them came in February 2014, when a committee under Narayan Rane recommended 16%.⁵ The Congress-NCP government acted in the last months before an election: Ordinance XIII of 2014, dated 9 July, giving 16% to the Marathas, and Ordinance XIV the same day giving 5% to fifty-two Muslim communities.¹ Both were challenged within months. Neither survived.

Then, in July 2016, a fifteen-year-old Maratha girl was raped and murdered at Kopardi in Ahmednagar district.⁶ Fifty-eight morchas, the silent mass marches that are Maharashtra's particular form of protest, moved through the state between August 2016 and 2017. They are the reason a government that had refused for twenty-eight years constituted a fresh commission.^4†

The commission that said yes

It was constituted under Justice S.B. Mhase and finished its work under Justice M.G. Gaikwad, who replaced him. Its field data came from the Gokhale Institute in Pune, which ran a caste-wise count of rural Maharashtra excluding the Scheduled Castes and Tribes.³

What it found is the case for the quota.

Around 76.86% of Maratha families have been found to be engaged in agriculture and agricultural labour for their livelihood.

That single sentence is doing two jobs, and the difference matters: it counts families who own the land they work together with families who work somebody else's. On income the commission was blunter. 85% of Maratha families, its data showed, lived on less than Rs 25,000 a year, a figure the High Court called sufficient in itself to indicate financial backwardness.³

The percentage of Below Poverty Line (B.P.L) families amongst the Marathas as per survey has been found to be 37.28% against the State average of 24.2%.

Half again the state's own poverty rate.

On the strength of that the state moved fast. The bill went before the assembly on or about 29 November 2018, and the Maharashtra State Reservation for Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Act was in force on the 30th, reserving 16% of seats and posts.⁷¹ One day. The petitioners who went to court would allege the bill had passed without any discussion, and that the commission's report was not before the members who voted on it.³

71%, or 98%

On land, the reporting of the commission's findings has never agreed with itself. One account puts 98% of Maratha farmers below 2.5 acres. Another puts it at 71%. The judgment carries both halves of the answer, because the commission measured twice.

The percentage of landless and marginal farmers (lands ownership less than 2.5 acres) is found to be around 71% amongst the Maratha families whereas the percentage of big farmers holding about 10 acres of land is only 2.7%.

And then, in the experts' own breakdown:

8.66% of Maratha families are landless, 62.74% of Maratha families own agricultural land not more than 2.5 acres, 19% own agricultural land more than 2.5 acres and less than 5 acres, 6% of Maratha families own agricultural land in the range of 5 to 10 acres

8.66 plus 62.74 is 71.4. The 71% is the landless added to the marginal, which is why it appears in one place as a single number and in another as a distribution. Read the judgment and the discrepancy dissolves.

The reading that points the other way

Set against the commissions is work nobody commissioned. In 2017 the economists Ashwini Deshpande and Rajesh Ramachandran found Marathas more likely to own or cultivate land than any other social group in Maharashtra, and found poverty within the community at 14%, against 16 among the Other Backward Classes and 27 among the Scheduled Castes and Tribes.⁸

Both readings are real, and they are not measuring the same thing. One asks what share of a group has any land at all. The other asks how large the holdings are among those who farm. A community can be wider in access and smaller in plots at the same time, which is what happens to a field divided between sons, and then between their sons.

Count the chief ministers, meanwhile, and the state disagrees with itself again. The Supreme Court says thirteen of nineteen. A newspaper analysis says twelve of twenty.⁸ A summary of a later commission's submission says eleven of twenty, and adds that over 60% of Maharashtra's MLAs since 1962 have been Maratha.^9† Different cut-off years, not contradictions, but by now the pattern is hard to miss. On this subject India produces a different number every time it counts.

What the deaths were asked to prove

On 1 July 2025 Maharashtra's rehabilitation minister told the state legislative assembly that 767 farmers had died by suicide in the first three months of that year. One every three hours.¹⁰

In Marathwada, the region at the centre of the agitation, that quarter ran 32% above the same quarter of 2024.¹¹ The ten months to October recorded 899.¹² For 2023 the divisional commissioner counted 1,088 while parliamentary data gave 1,116, and nobody has reconciled the two.¹³ Nationally the NCRB put Maharashtra at 3,824 farm-sector suicides in 2024, the largest count of any state.¹⁴

Debt, a failed crop, a loan taken against land too small to ever service it. Nobody on any side of the reservation question disputes that this is happening, or why.

What they dispute is what caste has to do with it, and this is where the counting starts to bend, because each side needs the dead to prove something different. The Gokhale Institute found 40% of the farmers who died to be Maratha. By 2024 the Shukre Commission had a far starker number for the Bombay High Court: across ten years of statistics, more than 94% of suicides by open-category persons were Maratha.¹⁵

Those two are not the same claim, and the larger one is the weaker. It counts only the open category, which excludes by definition everyone already inside a reservation, so in a state where Marathas make up much of what is left outside, a high share is closer to arithmetic than to a finding. The smaller number is the harder one, and even it cannot be read alone: whether 40% is high depends on what share of Maharashtra's farmers are Maratha, and that figure is not in the record either. The state that cannot count its Marathas cannot tell you whether they are dying out of proportion.

One toll is counted separately and must stay that way. Nineteen people died in a twelve-day window in October and November 2023, in the agitation itself, on the state government's own figures.¹⁶ Add those nineteen to the farm figures, as the temptation always is, and you get a number that proves nothing about either.

Two courts, two years, one ceiling

The 2018 Act was challenged at once. Justices Ranjit More and Bharati Dangre reserved judgment in March 2019 and delivered it on 27 June. Justice More opened by naming the problem rather than the parties.

Every democracy is challenged by the complex task of providing social justice to sections that have been traditionally discriminated against

They upheld the Act but held 16% too high. The state cut it to 12% in education and 13% in jobs, and the case went on appeal to the Supreme Court.¹⁷

A five-judge Constitution Bench heard it: Ashok Bhushan, S. Abdul Nazeer, L. Nageswara Rao, Hemant Gupta and S. Ravindra Bhat. Justice Bhat began with Roosevelt.

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Then they struck the law down, and the reasoning was arithmetic rather than anthropology. 50% is the ceiling on total reservation, fixed in the Indra Sawhney judgment of 1992, and it can be crossed only in circumstances that court called extraordinary. Twelve and thirteen on top of an existing fifty crossed it.

Indra Sawhney (supra) does not require to be referred to a larger bench nor does it require reconsideration in the light of subsequent constitutional amendments, judgments and changed social dynamics of the society

Maharashtra had argued that with 85% of its population backward and only 50% of places available, the arithmetic was itself the extraordinary circumstance. The Court disagreed, and it was in answering that argument that it called the Marathas a dominant forward class.¹

This is the part most often lost. The quota did not fall because the Court found the community prosperous. It fell because the total crossed a line drawn in 1992, and Maharashtra had not shown the exceptional situation that alone permits crossing it. The distress findings were never disturbed. They simply stopped mattering.

A man who stopped eating

With the law struck down, the demand found a different method and a different leader. Manoj Jarange Patil's argument is that no new law is needed at all. Marathwada was ruled from Hyderabad before it was part of Maharashtra, and the Nizam's revenue clerks recorded a great many Maratha families as Kunbi. Kunbi is already an Other Backward Class. Find the paper, issue the certificate, and the quota follows without a legislature or a court. It is the door Justice Khatri left ajar in 1995.

His instrument is his own body. In late August 2023 he began a hunger strike at Antarwali Sarati and was put on intravenous fluids on the ninth day. Police baton-charged the protest during that fast, and a village sit-in became a state-wide one.¹⁸ He fasted again in October, in January, in February, and again before the 2024 general election.¹⁹

In February 2024, between those fasts, Maharashtra passed its second reservation law. 10% this time, resting on a survey by a fresh commission under Justice Shukre.²⁰ That commission produced the most quoted version of the dominance argument and the most quoted version of the backwardness argument, which is an unusual thing for one body to do. It is the source of the claim that Marathas hold 86 of the state's 105 sugar factories, about 55% of its educational institutions and over 70% of its cooperative bodies.^9† Those figures come from its own submission rather than from land records, and no independent audit of them is held here.

Jarange kept fasting anyway, because a statute can be struck down and a certificate cannot. In September 2025 he ended another strike after the government accepted six of his eight demands.²¹

The certificates have been issued: 3,16,977 of them in Marathwada, on the state's own count.²² And the route produced exactly the opposition anyone would predict. Other Backward Class organisations say it is a side door into a quota that is already full, and they went to court. In September 2025 the Bombay High Court called one such petition misconceived and its petitioners not aggrieved parties.²³

Four things are decided. The main one is not.

Whatever anybody argues next, these four are no longer open. The 2018 quota fell on the 50% ceiling and not on any finding that Marathas are prosperous. The distress figures the Gaikwad Commission produced were never overturned by either court. Of the two suicide shares in circulation, the smaller is the sounder. And Maharashtra does not know how many Marathas it has, which means it cannot calculate a proportionate share of anything for them.

The question underneath all of it has never been put to a court, and no commission has been asked it either. Reservation is an instrument built for social exclusion, for communities kept out of temples and schools and offices. What the commissions keep finding among Marathas is something adjacent but not the same: small plots, thin incomes, failing crops, debt. A quota can open a door that was shut. Whether it can do anything about a field that has been divided four times is a different matter entirely, and every one of these judgments and reports stops short of it.

There are at least four answers on the table and the record does not choose between them. A caste census, so that the denominator exists. Relief aimed at agrarian distress rather than at caste. A constitutional amendment to lift the ceiling. Or the Kunbi certificate route, which is the only one of the four currently moving, and which works by reclassifying people rather than by helping them.

The 10% law is in force and its validity has not been decided. Nothing here should be read as settling that. The agitation has not stopped.

Which leaves Maharashtra roughly where it stood in 1980, with three differences. It now has a Supreme Court judgment running to 568 pages¹ and a High Court judgment whose own pagination reaches 487,³ a shelf of commission reports going back forty-six years, and three surveys that cannot agree on how many people it is arguing about. What it still does not have is a count.

What is not known

The Gaikwad Commission's full report is not held by this archive, only the two courts' record of its findings. The Shukre Commission's affidavit is not held either, only a newspaper's report of it. The 2024 Act's text here comes from a research organisation's copy rather than from the Maharashtra gazette, whose archive could not be read by machine. CEDA's page carrying the Deshpande and Ramachandran analysis could not be stored, so that work is cited through a newspaper's account of it.

One outlet, The Left Views, has reported 5,075 farmer suicides in Marathwada across 2021 to 2025, and 1,129 in 2025 alone. No second outlet carries the cumulative figure and this archive could not store the page, so it is named here and deliberately not cited as a number.

One figure in the 2019 judgment appears twice with different values, 6% and 65% of Marathas in government service, which is why no employment share is quoted above.

This piece states the position as of 12 September 2026.

MangoPOV. "Maratha reservation explained: 37.28% below the poverty line, and the 50% ceiling." 11 September 2026. https://mangopov.in/stories/maratha-reservation-explained/

@misc{mangopov-maratha-reservation-explained,
  title        = {Maratha reservation explained: 37.28% below the poverty line, and the 50% ceiling},
  author       = {{MangoPOV}},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://mangopov.in/stories/maratha-reservation-explained/}},
}