We analyze the implications of the light gluino scenario for the unifi
cation of gauge and Yukawa couplings within the minimal supersymmetric
standard model. Within this scheme all fermionic supersymmetric parti
cles are naturally light, while the scalar partners of quarks and lept
ons, together with the heavy Higgs doublet may be heavy. This implies
both a bound on tan beta < 2.3, in order to fulfill the experimental c
onstraints on the chargino masses, and a strong correlation between si
n2 theta(W) (M(Z)) and alpha3 (M(Z)), due to the suppression of the su
persymmetric threshold corrections to the low energy values of the gau
ge couplings. Assuming the scalar sparticles to be lighter than 10 TeV
, the physical top quark mass is constrained to be 145 GeV < M(t) < 21
0 GeV for tan beta > 1, while the strong gauge coupling values, 0.122
less-than-or-equal-to alpha3 (M(Z)) less-than-or-equal-to 0.133, are i
n good agreement with the measured LEP ones. We also show that a relax
ation of some of the conventional assumptions is necessary in order to
achieve the radiative breaking of the electroweak symmetry within the
grand unification scheme.