ST certificates: SC for larger Bench to determine fool–proof parameters

Judiciary no longer sure of ‘affinity test’ to sift through anthropological, ethnological traits

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The Supreme Court wants to fix fool–proof parameters to determine if a person belongs to a Scheduled Tribe and is entitled to the benefits due to the community.

The judiciary is no longer sure about an "affinity test" used to sift through anthropological and ethnological traits to link a person to a tribe. There is the likelihood that contact with other cultures, migration and modernisation would have erased the traditional characteristics of a tribe.

So, an apex court Bench of Justices Hemant Gupta and V. Ramasubramanian has considered it best to refer the question of fixing the parameters to a larger Bench. The Bench emphasised that the issue was a “matter of importance” when it came to issuance of caste certificates.

According to the “Scheduled Tribes in India as revealed in Census 2011” by C. Chandramouli (Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India, Ministry of Home Affairs), there are said to be 705 ethnic groups notified as Scheduled Tribes (STs). Over 10 crore Indians are notified as STs, of which 1.04 crore live in urban areas. The STs constitute 8.6% of the population and 11.3% of the rural population.

The Supreme Court’s decision to refer the question to a larger Bench for an authoritative decision came after it realised that the courts were faced with varied opinions about the efficacy of the affinity test.

On one side, a full bench of the Bombay High Court in Shilpa Vishnu Thakur Vs. State of Maharashtra accepted the “relevance and importance of the affinity test”. The full bench, in a decision in 2009, held that the affinity test was an “integral part” of the verification process for caste certificates. Scrutiny committees could easily determine the authenticity of a claim by running an affinity test on the basis of ethnicity and anthropology.