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

Concept

Colonial ethnography (Risley, Elwin, Ghurye, Hutton) argued over isolation, animism and “backward Hindu”. Article 342 lets the President, after consultation, specify STs for a state; Parliament amends the list. The word in the Constitution is not defined by a section of traits. Article 366(25) only points back to the specified list. Fifth and Sixth Schedules add area to people.

Anthropologically, Indian “tribes” include foragers, jhum cultivators, peasants and urban workers. Bailey’s continuum and Sinha’s tribe-caste already said the boundary is historical.

Administrator’s criteria

• The Lokur Committee (1965) criteria, still the administrative gospel, are: indication of primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact, and backwardness. The Xaxa Committee (2014) quoted them and showed how they insult and misfire. Earlier, the Dhebar Commission (1960–61) and Renuka Ray, and later Bhuria, talked of development and autonomy more than of “shyness”.

• Listing is political: a community is ST in one state and OBC or unlisted across the border (Gonds, Bhils, tea-tribes of Assam). PVTGs are a further administrative layer inside ST, born from Dhebar’s primitive tribal groups.

Limitations

• Primitive traits is a colonial leftover. A laptop and a clan god can sit in one house.
• Isolation fails for tea-garden, mining and city STs. Shyness pathologises people who avoid a hostile thana.
• Distinctive culture is real but not unique to STs; every jati claims it.
• Backwardness overlaps OBC and SC. It cannot tell a tribe from a caste by itself.
• State-specific lists create border injustice. Courts have generally refused to let a person carry ST status across states as a personal portable race (Marri Chandra Shekhar Rao; later Bir Singh on similar SC/ST portability logic).
• Inclusion politics: groups campaign with dressed folklore. Nomenclature fights (tea tribes, Gorkha, some Rajasthan claims) show criteria cannot be applied like a blood test.
• FRA and PESA need a territorial community; a listed ST in a city may have the certificate and not the forest.

Samata, Niyamgiri (Orissa Mining Corporation, 2013) and Wildlife First FRA litigation show that the live legal tribe is a community with Gram Sabha and hill or forest rights, which Lokur’s adjectives never described.

Xaxa asked to drop “primitive” and to use livelihood, historical injustice, relative isolation where it exists, and self-identification with safeguards against fraud. The administrator’s five tests remain because they are easy to photocopy, not because they are true.