Denotified Tribes

A Denotified Tribe (DNT) is a community that was once officially classified as a "criminal tribe" by the colonial administration and was later released from that classification. Here, "denotified" means that the earlier legal notification was withdrawn following the repeal of the colonial criminal-tribe laws. The term "tribe" is therefore a historical-administrative label and does not automatically mean a Scheduled Tribe.

Colonial origin

The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 empowered the colonial government to notify a tribe, gang or class of persons as being addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences. Notified communities faced collective surveillance, registration and restrictions on residence or movement, treating criminality as an inherited community characteristic.

How communities became denotified

After independence, the Criminal Tribes Laws (Repeal) Act, 1952 repealed the criminal-tribe laws. Communities formerly covered by those notifications consequently came to be described as denotified tribes. Denotification ended their formal collective classification as criminal, but government commissions have recorded the persistence of stigma and socio-economic exclusion.

Relation to present social categories

DNT is not a single, uniform constitutional category. Depending on the community and the state or Union Territory, DNT communities may be included among Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes or Other Backward Classes, while some may fall outside these lists.

• Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are constitutionally specified under Articles 341 and 342 respectively; denotification by itself does not confer either status.
• Denotified, nomadic and semi-nomadic communities overlap, but the terms are not synonymous: not every DNT is nomadic, and not every nomadic community was historically notified.

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