riders after a detailed analysis of the criteria seeking to respond to the courts queries the committee differentiated it from the income criteria adopted to disentitle creamy layer among obcs for quotas the committee comprising former finance secretary pandey prof v k malhotra of icssr and principal economic adviser to the government sanjeev sanyal was set up on november 30 and submitted its report to the government on december 31 after eight meetingsthe committee said that the ews may however exclude irrespective of income a person whose family has 5 acres of agricultural land and above as was included in the 2019 criteria which was challenged in the sc the change from the 2019 ews norms would be exclusion of residential assets criteria which was found to be difficult to collate and verify and a compliance burden the residential asset criteria had drawn serious objections from the sc on the ground that the value of a residential asset varies substantially between urban and rural areas and even within big cities like mumbai according to the location of the residential propertythe centre had set up the committee to revisit 2019 ews criteria after an sc bench headed by justices d y chandrachud on october 7 remarked economic backwardness is a realistic thing there is no doubt about it as people dont have money to purchase books to even have food but as far as the ews is concerned they are forward class and there is no social or educational backwardness among them so can you apply the same yardstick of rs 8 lakh limit for the creamy layer to the ews please remember with regard to the ews we are not dealing with social and educational backwardness what was the basis of fixing the limit or have you simply lifted the criteria for the creamy layer and put it for ews the committee has pointed out that the rs 8 lakh limit includes all family income including from agriculture sources making the exercise stricter than in case of obc quotasthe committee said the current gross annual family income limit for ews of rs 8 lakh or less may be retained in other words only those families whose annual income is upto rs 8 lakh would be eligible to get the benefit of ews reservation the definition of family and income would remain the same as those in the office memorandum of january 17 2019in the case of admissions to educational institutions sudden adoption of a new criteria inevitably and necessarily would delay the process by several months which would have an inevitable cascading effect on all future admissions and educational activitiesteachingexamination which are time bound under various statutoryjudicial prescriptions it said the committee also suggested a threeyear loop cycle monitoring of implementation of new criteria suggested by it for effecting required corrections in futureexamining in detail the issue raised by the sc whether an annual family income of rs 8 lakh is too high as a cutoff for identifying the ews