Nomads,denotified communities in state complain of exclusion

The reason cited by enumerators is that they live in tents and huts and have no permanent residence. Community members from Vasan village of Banaskantha district told The Sunday Express that the enumerators who came to their village on Friday refused to register homes of around 100 families.

All those who were excluded from housing enumeration are from ‘Nut’ community and had no permanent houses as they moved from one place to another in search of livelihood and lived on roadsides or government land by erecting tents or temporary huts,said Maldev Madari.

Similar complaints have come from a nomadic community known as ‘Jogis’ currently staying at Dhaniawada village in Dantiwada taluka of Sabarkantha district. Ramesh Nath,a member of the Jogis in Dhaniwada,said that none of the 35 families of his community was registered by the enumerators who visited the village on April 22 for the process.

The enumerators in Chandisar village of Palanpur taluka also allegedly excluded nomadic communities. Mirkhan Madari said 300 Madari families that live on the outskirts of the village were not included in the first round of the enumeration process.

Assistant Director (Census) Rushali Warade said that those living in tents and huts could not be excluded. “I will look into the matter and ensure that all these people are included in the census,” she said.

Ganesh N Devy,who headed the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for denotified,nomadic and semi-nomadic Tribes (DNT-NT-SNT) and submitted its report to the Central government’s Social Justice Department in 2006,said no proper Census of these communities was ever conducted after 1931.

Saying that these communities were not included in the censuses of 1961,1971,1981 and 1991,he took 1931 population as the base-level and projected their population at around 6 crore in the country. The DNT-TN-SNT Commission had later come up with a figure of over 11 crore.

Devy had subsequently taken up the matter with the National Human rights Commission (NHRC) requesting it to include DNT,NT and SNT into one group and enumerate them with a view to preparing a programme for their social and economic uplift. NHRC,according to Devy,directed the Registrar General of Census to do a proper counting of nomadic and denotified communities.

According to Devy,Justice M N Venkatachalaiya,who headed the Special Commission for Reviewing the Working of the Indian Constitution has commented that nomadic and denotified communities have lagged behind in absence of the information about their population and geographical location.