The 2019 Budget Is The Latest Pit Stop Towards Bringing Development To De-Notified And Nomadic Tribes

The interim budget for 2019-20 was tabled today and by every yardstick there were some major announcements which will impact public perception. But, if we look beyond the massive tax exemption for salaried individuals and the guaranteed income assurance for small farmers, there is a piece of announcement that has been pushed to the background. Moving the discussion towards the most deprived sections of the society, the Finance Minister Piyush Goyal spoke of de-notified nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes.

The budget announced the formation of a committee under the NITI Aayog to complete the task of identifying the yet unclassified de-notified and nomadic tribes. Additionally, a welfare development board will be established under the Ministry of Social Justice and Development for designing and implementing schemes targeting the members of these extremely vulnerable communities.

This might look like a small measure of more targeted identification looking at just these announcements. But it has been the culmination of a long process of engagement with the issues plaguing the targeting and inclusion of what probably is the most marginalized and excluded social group in the country since decades.

Let us begin with who are the de-notified nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes? During the colonial rule, certain tribal communities were identified as hereditary criminals and were identified as habitual offenders under the criminal tribes’ act of 1871. In 1952, this colonial act was repealed and the notified criminal tribes came to be known as de-notified tribes.

While there was some clarity about the identification of the de-notified tribes, the definition and the identification of the nomadic and the semi-nomadic tribes has always been more difficult. Nomadic tribes are those who are in a continuous state of spatial movement and have no fixed income earning territory. Nomadic tribes are not migrants as they do not have a home land to speak of and nor are they rotating farmers who in a cyclical manner keep coming back to plots of land. Because of the continuous movement, these communities are difficult to trace, hard to reach and due to the lack of permanent settlements, less visible than other communities.

Again due to the continuous movement, these tribes are not duly recognised and are not beneficiaries of government schemes. A large number of nomadic and de-notified tribes are still considered criminal and hence face acute social and systemic discrimination.

These wandering communities are not just pastoral in nature and many of the groups are involved in activities like puppetry, acrobatics, snake charming, fortune telling, dance and music etc. Because of the dwindling of traditional modes of earning a livelihood and loss of access to forests, they are now in a state of penury.

Many of the DNT/NTs have been included in the list of SCs, STs and OBCs but have not been able to access any of the benefits accrued to the groups. One of the biggest issues facing the government is the inability to track these people and have a concrete idea of their population, geographical limits and settlement areas. The information deficit is one of the reasons why a large number of communities are not even a part of any list.

The issue of de-notified tribes was a cause espoused by the NDA-1 government too which had formed the first National Commission of De-notified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes (NCDNT) in the year 2003. It was reconstituted in the year 2005 under the UPA-1 government with Balkrishna Renke leading the commission.

The Renke commission report was tabled in the year 2008 with a series of recommendations. But strangely, for the whole of the UPA-2 term, the government completely forgot about the recommendations till 3 months before the elections of 2014! After the NDA government came to power some of the recommendations of the Renke commission were implemented, primary among which was, constituting a new NCDNT under the leadership of RSS functionary, Bhiku Ramji Idate. The key task of the newly formed commission was to finalise a list of DNT/NT in all the states and map their inclusion in the SC/ST/OBC lists.

In 2015, the Idate commission started its work and two more specific programmes for DNT children were implemented. These included the Dr. Ambedkar pre and post matric scholarship and the Nanaji Deshmukh scheme for construction of hostels for the DNT children. This was the first such centralised scheme for these communities.

In May 2018, the Idate commission filed their report with a state wide count of the DNT/NT and a list of about 260 marginalized groups who have not been included in any SC, ST, and OBC list. In states like Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh more than 45 communities have not been classified under any list.

Importantly, the commission had 20 important policy recommendations for the welfare of the communities which it identified as the most marginalized most downtrodden communities who are routinely subjected to atrocities, exclusion and social stigma. One of the key recommendations of the Idate commission was that the DNT/NT should be made into a separate category without bringing them under SCs, STs and OBCs. It also recommended protecting them under the SC-ST atrocities act and making the 2011 caste census public so that the data could be used to design tailor made interventions for them.

A month or two after the recommendations of the commission became public, the government had approached the Niti Aayog for its views about one of the recommendations which was to form a permanent commission for the communities on the lines of the SC, ST and OBC commissions. The government had also asked the Niti Aayog to form a working group to work on the holistic development of these communities on the lines of the Sustainable Development goals of the UN.

The Niti Aayog immediately agreed to the idea and even recommended some additional schemes like easy allotment of land and housing for the mostly landless DNT/NT communities.

The announcements in the budget today have been the result of a long process of research and engagement by both the Renke and the Idate commissions. The lack of political will on the part of the Congress had made the Renke commission recommendations redundant for a significantly long period of time.

The human fallout of this was immense as even the enumeration and identification of these communities was stalled and all efforts at their inclusion were confined to the pages of a dusty report.

Hopefully, the new welfare board along with the NITI Aayog committee will come up with an action plan on the lines of the work being done on aspirational districts to finally correct the historical wrong that these communities have been facing.