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Home/Anthropology/Mains PYQ/2025/Paper II/Tribal Development, Policy & Safeguards
UPSC MainsAnthropology Optional Paper II 2025 15 Marks Model Answer Available

Concept of Scheduled Tribe and Administrator’s Criteria — 2025 Paper II

Question · 2025 · Paper II · 15 Marks

Critically examine the concept of Scheduled Tribe (ST) and mention the limitations of administrator's criteria.

Model Answer

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Introduction

“Scheduled Tribe” is a constitutional-administrative category, not a scientific synonym for the anthropological concept of tribe. Article 366(25) defines STs as communities deemed to be Scheduled Tribes under Article 342. The President specifies them separately for each State or Union Territory, and only Parliament may subsequently include or exclude a community.

Nature and significance of the concept

  • The category recognises historically marginalised communities requiring protection of land, culture, representation and access to education and employment.
  • It is state-specific: a community may be scheduled in one State but not in another because history, status and relations with neighbouring populations differ.
  • India’s STs are extremely diverse - from settled cultivators and pastoralists to forest-dependent and urbanised groups - and cannot be defined by one cultural stage or economic type.
  • Constitutional safeguards include political reservation, Fifth and Sixth Schedule arrangements, Article 46, PESA 1996 and the Forest Rights Act 2006.

Administrator’s criteria

The criteria conventionally associated with the Lokur Committee (1965) are: indications of primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with the community at large, and backwardness. Proposals generally pass through the State government, Registrar General of India, Ministry of Tribal Affairs and National Commission for Scheduled Tribes before legislative change.

Limitations

  • Evolutionist and derogatory language: “primitive traits” places communities on an imagined ladder from primitive to civilised; “shyness of contact” converts exclusion into a cultural personality trait.
  • Static essentialism: Migration, education, conversion, urbanisation or cultural change may reduce visible distinctiveness without removing historical disadvantage.
  • No measurable weighting: The criteria do not specify thresholds, creating administrative inconsistency and prolonged disputes.
  • Regional anomalies: State-specific scheduling and older area restrictions may exclude members of the same community living across a border.
  • Cultural loss paradox: Groups most assimilated through dispossession may appear less “tribal” and thereby weaken their claim, although assimilation itself may be the result of vulnerability.
  • Internal diversity ignored: Class, gender, clan, region and differences between settled and displaced sections are obscured.
  • Political and evidentiary problems: Claims may be shaped by electoral mobilisation, outdated ethnographies and inadequate socio-economic data.

Towards improved identification

A revised approach should combine self-identification and community acceptance with documented historical marginalisation, land and forest dispossession, cultural-linguistic distinctiveness, development indicators and rigorous State-specific ethnography. The Jharkhand Assembly’s 2020 resolution seeking a separate Sarna census code illustrates indigenous self-identification that cannot be reduced to old administrative markers such as isolation or “primitive traits.” Constitutional benefits should respond to structural vulnerability, not require communities to remain culturally frozen.

Conclusion

The ST category is indispensable for social justice but conceptually imperfect. It should be administered as a dynamic, rights-based and evidence-based constitutional category, replacing colonial evolutionary labels with transparent assessment of history, identity and contemporary disadvantage.

Diagram to draw: Anthropological tribe != Scheduled Tribe; Article 342 process -> state-specific listing -> safeguards, with criteria critically reviewed.

Selected authentic sources: Constitution of India, Articles 342 and 366(25); Lokur Committee criteria as reproduced in National Commission for Scheduled Tribes reports; Xaxa Committee Report (2014); PESA 1996; Forest Rights Act 2006; Government of Jharkhand record of the 2020 Sarna code resolution.

 

 

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