It took the SC 10 years to say that an unjust order on sub-quotas needed a rethink. And then another six years for a Justice Arun Mishra-led bench to say the court may have been wrong. The last thing you expect me to do in these times is to welcome a Supreme Court judgment by Justice Arun Mishra’s bench. But it so happens that among the various questionable and controversial orders passed by Justice Arun Mishra before his retirement, one stood out for its positive potential. This judgment can remove a long-standing roadblock in fine-tuning India’s existing reservation policies. But it is too early to applaud. It would take another round of court hearings, careful legislative work and evidence-based policymaking for its positive potentials to be realised. Otherwise, it could open up a pandora’s box of political manipulations. This is about sub-classification of reservation quota meant for Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST). Job and educational quotas for these communities have not achieved all that was needed or hoped, but this is one of the few state interventions that has achieved something substantial. Across the world, India’s experience with reservations must be listed as one of the success stories of affirmative action for historically disadvantaged communities. Over the years, however, there have been serious complaints about uneven distribution of benefits of reservation within the various SC and ST castes and communities. I argued more than a decade ago that social justice policies need fine-tuning. It never happened. Allegations of certain castes or community groups having captured all the benefits of reservations are very common. This was bound to happen. Categories like Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe are very large baskets that contain social groups of different status, based on different traditional occupation and, therefore, varying degrees of disadvantage. Historically, they had very uneven exposure to modern education and were therefore unequally placed to take advantage of a system like reservation.