In 2027, India will undertake a caste enumeration for the first time since 1931. For Denotified, Nomadic, and Semi Nomadic Tribes, this moment carries a weight that goes far beyond bureaucratic exercise. Community leaders have secured an assurance from the Union government that these groups will be enumerated in the upcoming Census. Yet there is no clarity on how this enumeration will occur, and no commitment to a separate column in the Census form. For communities whose very history is one of erasure and stigma, the difference between being vaguely “included” and being specifically counted is the difference between visibility and continued disappearance.
Denotified Tribes, commonly referred to as DNTs, are communities that were once branded as “criminal tribes” under the colonial Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. That law empowered the state to register, surveil, and control entire communities on the presumption that criminality was hereditary. The Act was amended in 1924 and finally repealed in 1952. With repeal came “denotification”, but not dignity. The label changed, the suspicion remained. Soon after independence, many States enacted Habitual Offenders laws, which enabled continued police targeting of members of these communities. The colonial imagination of the “born criminal” quietly survived inside the postcolonial state.
Enumeration has always been central to their oppression and their exclusion. From 1911 onwards, colonial Census reports explicitly counted “criminal tribes”. The 1931 Census was the last time these communities were distinctly enumerated. After independence, the Republic chose not to enumerate castes beyond Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. In principle this was framed as a break from colonial caste fixation. In practice, it meant that communities who had been stigmatized as criminals vanished statistically. A people once over counted for surveillance became under counted for justice.
Over the decades, most DNT communities were absorbed into the categories of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, or Other Backward Classes. The most recent National Commission for Denotified, Nomadic, and Semi Nomadic Tribes, headed by Bhiku Ramji Idate, identified nearly 1,200 such communities. It also found that around 268 DNT communities had not been classified in any of these categories. The Commission made clear that without an accurate enumeration, policy would continue to operate in the dark. It was not the first to say so. Successive commissions, including the earlier Renke Commission, began with the same problem: before welfare, there must be identification.
The current demand for a separate Census column arises from lived experience of what community leaders describe as political misclassification. When DNTs are folded into the SC, ST, or OBC lists, they are forced to compete with larger and often more politically organized communities within those categories. In many regions, denotified and nomadic jatis remain among the most educationally and economically deprived, yet they are statistically indistinguishable from groups with far greater access to resources and representation. Leaders from north India point to villages where not a single member of certain denotified communities has completed secondary education, despite being listed as SC for decades. Formal inclusion has not translated into substantive equality.
The argument now being made is not simply for recognition, but for graded recognition. Community leaders have begun to invoke the Supreme Court’s 2024 judgment permitting sub classification within SC and ST categories. They argue that even if sub classification is operationalized within existing lists, it will not address the specific stigma of denotification. The demand is for a separate Constitutional Schedule for DNTs, on par with the existing SC and ST Schedules, along with internal sub classification to account for graded backwardness between settled and nomadic denotified communities. The point is not symbolic parity but structural correction.
The distinction between settled and nomadic DNT communities is not trivial. According to accounts presented before commissions, until the 1960s most denotified communities were similarly placed in conditions of deprivation. Over time, some settled groups were able to leverage land, local networks, or small enterprises to improve their situation marginally. Nomadic and semi nomadic communities, lacking fixed residence, documentation, and access to schooling, were left further behind. Without internal differentiation, a uniform policy risks reproducing internal hierarchies within the DNT category itself.
The state’s existing welfare approach has demonstrated the limits of piecemeal intervention. The Social Justice Ministry’s SEED scheme was designed to support DNTs in education, health, housing, and livelihood. Yet in the last five years, only a fraction of the planned expenditure has been utilized. As is increasingly visible across affirmative action and social justice programmes, the egalitarian edge of such schemes has been administratively diluted. However, a principal reason for this failure is bureaucratic paralysis around certification. To access benefits, individuals must possess a DNT certificate, even if they are already classified as SC, ST, or OBC. Many States simply do not issue such certificates. In effect, the state announces schemes for a category it refuses to formally recognize. The result is predictable. Benefits reach a minuscule fraction of those intended.
This administrative failure is not accidental. Without a clear Constitutional status or a separate Census code, DNTs exist in a grey zone. They are recognized enough to be invoked in speeches, but not recognized enough to command uniform policy implementation. Associations such as the All India Denotified Nomadic Tribes Development Council have repeatedly emphasized that wherever they approach courts or governments, the first question posed is numerical strength: How many are you? In the absence of official data, estimates vary wildly. Some leaders claim crores in a single State. The truth is that no one knows properly. In a democracy that allocates representation and resources through numbers, ignorance is exclusion.
The moral and political stakes are higher than administrative design. The original branding of these communities as criminal was not an incidental error. It was a tool of governance rooted in caste ideology and colonial control. To be marked as criminal by birth is to be denied the presumption of innocence that underpins modern citizenship. Denotification in 1952 did not come with an institutional apology, reparations, or structural safeguards against continued profiling. Instead, Habitual Offenders laws and everyday policing practices reproduce suspicion that continue till date across judicial and policing contexts. The stigma has seeped into schooling, employment, and housing. It has hardened into social fact.
Against this history, the promise of enumeration without clarity is inadequate, a familiar strategy through which governments acknowledge caste without confronting its structural consequences. If DNTs are merely to be counted under pre existing SC, ST, or OBC headings, their specific trajectory of criminalization and denotification will once again dissolve into larger aggregates. Critics may argue that creating a separate Schedule risks proliferating categories which often is worrying because of the expanding powers allowed to the state to regulate. But according to the DNT activists, a separate column in the Census is not an exercise in identity fragmentation. It is a demand for empirical truth. It is a claim that policy must correspond to history. Without distinct data, there can be no targeted allocation, no evaluation of outcomes, no accountability.
What stands before the government is a simple choice. It can treat the 2027 Census as a technical formality and subsume DNTs within existing codes. Or it can confront a century and a half of stigmatization by ensuring that these communities are distinctly counted and constitutionally recognized. In a republic that claims to have broken with colonial injustice, it is indefensible that the descendants of those once branded hereditary criminals must still beg to be seen as a category of citizens. With so many anti-caste hopes pinned onto the upcoming Census, this is not a minor technical demand. It is a test of whether the Republic is prepared to reckon with the communities it once marked as criminal and then has forgotten. If counting determines power in a broken democracy, then refusing to count is continuing violence.
Paresh Hate is a Bahujan queer researcher, writer, documenter and activist and the Lead Content Manager at Dalit Voice.