Office of Registrar General of India following obsolete criteria to define ST’s

Office of Registrar General of India following obsolete criteria to define ST’s

Subject : History

Context: The Office of the Registrar General of India (RGI) is following the set of criteria set out by the Lokur Committee nearly 60 years ago to define any new community as a Scheduled Tribe as per the RTI reply submitted by office of RGI.

• This comes even as the government, until December 2017, insisted in Parliament that it was considering a proposal to change the criteria for scheduling of new communities as STs based on the report of an internal task force, which called these criteria “obsolete”, “condescending”, “dogmatic”, and “rigid”.

Lokur Committee

• The Lokur Committee (1965) was set up to look into criteria for defining Schedule Tribes.
• The Committee recommended 5 criteria for identification, namely, primitive traits, distinct culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with the community at large, and backwardness.

Internal task force and proposed Criteria

• A Task Force under the Chairmanship of the then Secretary (Tribal Affairs) was constituted by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs in February, 2014 to examine the existing criteria and procedure.
• The Task Force in its report submitted to the Ministry has made recommendations, among other things, for revision of criteria and procedure for scheduling of tribes as STs.
• It includes “socioeconomic, including educational, backwardness, the rest of the population of the State; historical geographical isolation which may or may not exist today; distinct language/dialect; presence of a core culture relating to life­cycle, marriage, songs, dance, paintings, folklore; endogamy, or in case of exogamy, marital relationship primarily with other STs.

Registrar General of India

• The Registrar General of India was founded in 1961 by the Government of India under the Ministry of Home Affairs.
• It arranges, conducts and analyses the results of the demographic surveys of India including the Census of India and Linguistic Survey of India.
• The position of Registrar is usually held by a civil servant holding the rank of Joint Secretary.