When we traverse far-flung interiors or border hamlets in South Asia, one thought crops up intermittently. What constitutes a tribe? How does the process of inclusion and exclusion from the scheduled tribes list operate at a policy level? The recent Indian Anthropology Congress organised by the ministry of culture and presided
over by a member of the National Commission of Scheduled Tribes, Nirupam Chakma, harped on this crucial tenet.
Leading anthropologists opine that the evaluation of tribes is based on a continuum and not on a binary classification. Is the time ripe for a paradigm shift from the government’s age-old criteria for determining tribal identity and promulgating a new framework? The Anthropological Survey of India’s 2025 post-Congress communiqué asserted that this could be the beginning of changing our perception on community classification as tribal motifs. More so since successive National Commissions set up by regimes at the helm have failed to come up with an unassailable classification tool for tribal identity.
The Imperial Gazetteer of India had described a tribe as “a collection of families bearing a common name, speaking a common dialect, occupying or professing to occupy a common territory and not usually endogamous though originally it might have been so.” India presently has around 750 entries in its list of STs. Since the last census in 2011, there have been 27 new additions to the ST category as main and sub-entries. Hundreds of other communities are on the periphery, agitating to be included in the list in order to access the benefits of reservation in education, jobs and other governmental aid.
Since its advisory in 1965, the B.N. Lokur Committee’s yardstick of five indicators is being used to assess a community’s entry into the ST category. These criteria include ‘primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with community at large and backwardness.’ Numerous experts have termed these criteria as both condescending and archaic, markers that are out of touch with the contemporary social ethos. B.V. Sharma, director, Anthropological Survey of India, also critiqued the Lokur Committee’s methodology, stressing that virtually no community can meet these standards in full.
Instead of attempting to assess tribal identity on the basis of dated criteria, conceiving a reliable tool to assess the tribal nature of a community would be a more plausible approach. Only this strategy can do justice to ensure a broad spectrum for STs given the regional diversity of India. If a community’s tribal features were to be judged using a gamut of factors, it would be feasible for tribal research bodies to prepare ethnographic reports to aid policy-making decisions. The resultant ethnographic databases prepared to consider claims of a tribe’s inclusion in the ST list would thus be realistic and holistic.
But there are opponents to this proposed revisionism. Many tribal outfits, including the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh affiliate, Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad, have instead, championed a more rigid application of the Lokur Committee benchmarks for inclusions in the ST list. However, a focus on social institutions for this purpose would be reductive in a multi-ethnic society like ours. Matrimony, kinship, rituals in vogue, language and the materiality of cultural indicators, including headgear or weaponry, could be better indicators to distinguish tribal populations from other communities. The crux is to move from an evolutionary schema towards a more historical or civilisational approach. The gap between academicians and policy-makers in terms of their understanding of the criteria to define tribal people has to be bridged.
Bottlenecks are to be expected in any kind of a paradigm shift in the identification of tribal identity. Consider the trigger for the ongoing ethnic turmoil in Manipur. The Meitei community’s plea to be labelled an ST community is being opposed by the Kuki-Zo tribes. In this instance, the ST status is not a marker; it forms the vanguard in a contest over land, autonomy and survival. The Meiteis and the Zo communities muster their respective versions of history and territory to validate their claims and existence. In Arunachal Pradesh, the Monpas of Tawang and West Kameng are a Tibetan-Buddhist group and are now counted as a ST community. They articulate the same to distinguish themselves from claims of citizenship by Tibetan refugees. Their claim to a share of government benefits depends on their inclusion in the ST category.
After the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government came to power at the Centre in 2014, an effort was made to alter the benchmark for ST status. A task force was constituted under the leadership of the then tribal affairs secretary, Hrusikesh Panda, to review and potentially revise the yardstick for identifying STs. The Panda Task Force compiled a comprehensive list of over 40 communities from across India, including Assamese tea tribes and backward ethnic groups from Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, for prioritisation in the ST list. But the ministry of tribal affairs put the report on the back burner for eight years. In 2022, the government decided to continue with the Lokur Committee norms despite the task force claiming that these archaic norms “defeated the Constitutional agenda for affirmative action and inclusion”.
The government claims that after centuries of systemic exclusion, India’s tribal population is gradually moving beyond the margins of society. Among key tribal welfare initiatives addressing their longstanding inequalities are augmented funding, the Eklavya Model Residential Schools and the ‘Development Action Plan’ for Scheduled Tribes. The government is gung-ho about empowering tribal entrepreneurs and building a start-up ecosystem for STs. It is high time that the AnSI’s matrix indicator tool for determining tribal identity should replace the Centre’s existing five-point formula for inclusion in the list of STs.
Chiranjib Haldar is a commentator on politics and society