The dreariness is typical of state authority—dank corridors gutted by cubby-hole offices, piles of air-coolers and mineral water canisters, spittoons and grey officials. But it is also the centrum where the fate and fortune of hundreds of tribes, castes, lineage and stock is decided. The Social Studies Division is the research and authorising wing of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner’s office.It’s the crucial stop in the Centre hierarchy where petitions and requests for SC/ST certificates are sent to, and vital and weighty decisions roll out from these unremarkable cells. The department is staffed by nine basic officials-Assistant Registrar General Dr I C Agarwal and his personal assistant, one deputy and three assistant generals, two research officers and one printing officer. There’s a library at the end of the corridor where anthropological and social data of census collected over the decades are stacked. The division gets an average of 125 requests a year.Not surprisingly, it’s a pressure cooker environment at the department whenever a contentious proposal is in the offing, with politicians and lobbyists breathing down its neck to pass or reject a proposal. The process is straightforward. After the state Government proposes, it goes to the “post office”, the National Commission of ST or SC as the case may be, which forwards the proposal to the Social Studies Division. If approved, it goes back to the commission, which also has the veto power to accept or reject, and if cleared, moves to the Union Cabinet, becomes a Bill, and then is passed in Parliament. A proposal can be rejected by the division only twice and cannot come up for review again.The department has received hundreds of applications, from certifying the cave men of Kattunaikan in Kerala, to the Toda tribe of Tamil Nadu, to the Muria tribes of Bastar. “There are thousands of tribes and sub-castes,” says another official. “The criteria for certification was laid down by the Lokur Committee in 1965— geographic isolation, distinctive culture, economic and educational backwardness, primitive culture and shyness.”The researchers access their data from the library and study all published literature on the subject, ranging from old census reports, district census handbooks, old ethnographers, archival and university research papers. “Old records have always proved to be the most useful and accurate,” says the official, “rarely do we do field work as it can be staged.”It is not only about new tribes and castes, but also the ever-changing demography, says an official. “For instance, a section of Bhils of Madhya Pradesh who embraced Hinduism and became Mama Bhils, demanded a separate identity and separate ST status for themselves. Theoretically, they cannot apply for ST certificate,” says an official. “The Meenas, who are fiercely opposing the Gurjjar demand for ST status were originally Vhils, which became Bhil, and the more sophisticated they became, they were called Meenas,” he adds.
