New Delhi, May 23 -- The Supreme Court on Friday grappled with a question that has increasingly occupied the centre of India's reservation debate: should the benefits of affirmative action continue to flow, generation after generation, to families that have already achieved substantial social and economic advancement through reservations?

A bench of justices BV Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan repeatedly questioned whether children of socially mobile, professionally accomplished and financially secure parents should continue to claim reservation benefits under the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category, indicating judicial concern over what the court saw as the perpetual continuation of quota benefits among already upwardly mobile sections.

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