Supreme Court judge Justice S. Ravindra Bhat on Wednesday said creating a separate Schedule in the Constitution for denotified, nomadic, and semi-nomadic tribes and the extension of the Prevention of Atrocities against SC/ST Act to them “requires urgent consideration and appropriate action”.
His remarks came as he was delivering the Vimukta Day Lecture 2022 organised by the Criminal Justice & Police Accountability Project on the 70th year of decriminalisation of the Criminal Tribes Act.
Justice Bhat added that the government should show an “essence of urgency” to finish the ethnographic survey of DNT communities that have been left out of the SC, ST, and OBC lists and ensure that it translates into “tangible policy measures that extend the benefit of affirmative action to the appropriate communities as well.”
The Anthropological Survey of India and three Tribal Research Institutes in the country are currently engaged in studying 267 DNT, NT, SNT communities that have so far not been categorised as either SC, ST, or OBC. The AnSI has submitted reports on 24 communities out of the 255 it ought to and has assured the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment that the rest would be done by October this year.
As a result of this delay in this ethnographic exercise, the government’s SEED scheme has been held up with over 400 applications for benefits received but none of them approved so far, as reported by The Hindu earlier this week.
During the lecture, Justice Bhat also addressed how environmental laws, habitual offender laws, and forest conservation laws have been framed without considering that the livelihoods of DNT communities depended on certain traditional practices that are even now criminalised as a result.
Justice Bhat said, “Unfortunately, unlike colonial administrations which relied heavily on documentation and archival efforts and based their policies on such exercises for good or for worse, the stereotypes for DNTs and prejudicial treatment suffered by them is the subject of very limited contemporary empirical evidence severely restricting the scope of reformative measures.”
“The Idate commission in 2017 comprehensively prepared lists of Denotified, nomadic, and semi-nomadic communities that are not recipients of affirmative action under the Constitutional mandate of SC, ST, OBC. To determine who within the identified 269 tribes need to be considered for inclusion requires close scrutiny,” he said.
On the slowness of the ethnographic survey, Justice Bhat noted that even a Parliamentary Standing Committee had pointed this out and sought a fixed date for its completion. “It is unfortunate that despite consistent conclusions by the national commissions, little has been done. State has to be alerted to ensure that this ethnographical exercise is completed and should show an essence of urgency which leads to tangible policy measures that extend the benefit of affirmative action to the appropriate communities as well,“ he said.
The Supreme Court Judge added, “Members of the CPA have themselves pointed out that since the NCRB prepares a detailed annual report detailing statistics of prisoners accused and convicted of crimes, it could be used to analyse the impact of the criminal system on the DNTs if data was collected on caste as a relevancy and perhaps warrants consideration.
“Similarly, in the absence of caste-specific demographics in the Census, there is difficulty in assessing the necessity and extent of reform policies required for the betterment of these (DNT) communities. However, collection of data in relation to caste is a complex matter in Indian society, even contentious and has to be done with the utmost care and consideration so that it can be used to facilitate welfare policies rather than offend the preambulatory principle of fraternity and cause more social divisions.“
“Constitutional guarantees include at the root of them non-discrimination under Article 15 (1) and Article (17) which are applicable not just against the state - which percolate to changing societal attitudes of stigmatisation when declining to provide, housing, jobs, etc. In this regard, the consistent suggestion across decades - be it the NHRC report of 2000 or the Idate Commission recommendations (2017), to create a separate schedule for these DNT (denotified, nomadic, semi-nomadic tribes) communities and extend the protection of the prevention of atrocities against SC/ST Act requires urgent consideration and appropriate action,” Justice Bhat said.
