From Criminalisation to Citizenship: Institutional Exclusion of Denotified and Nomadic Tribes in Maharashtra

Introduction

The denotified people and nomadic tribes of India are in a peculiar state of constitutional status in the country. Communities designated as hereditary criminals under the colonial Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 and subsequently denotified in 1952 do not have a single constitutional home like the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes whose disadvantage is recognised in the Constitution. A small portion of them are listed as STs, some as SCS, and many as OBCs, while a large number are not classified in any category (National Commission for Denotified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes [NCDNT], 2008). This fragmentation is a direct descendant of a colonial classificatory apparatus which first built these communities as criminal by birth and then handed the postcolonial state the task of (in)completely disassembling that construction in an uneven fashion.

Maharashtra has a special significance in the study of this incomplete transformation. The state has its own administrative category, VJNT, and has its own welfare department, and reservation policies are older than the ones implemented by the central government. In the state of Maharashtra, Mumbai is a kind of city-state that brings the national narrative into a more manageable, more legible area. Two significant TISS studies, one by Agrawal & Sinha (2012) and the second by Agarwal & Sahay (2013), have focused on the Pardhi community, who came to the city from the districts affected by the drought in Solapur, Osmanabad, and Parbhani and, unusually, offered an empirical window on urban DNT life in terms of scale. Agrawal & Sinha (2012) and Agarwal & Sahay (2013) have both focused on the Pardhi community (scale-wise) who migrated to the city from the drought-affected districts of Solapur, Osmanabad and Parbhani and have provided an unusually detailed empirical window on urban DNT life.

The formal-substantive citizenship dichotomy is the main analytical question tackled here. In 1952 the legal fiction of hereditary criminality was abolished by the process of denotification, and the latter part of the decade saw the introduction of welfare boards, scholarship schemes and a national commission set up to monitor the situation among these communities. However, the evidence reviewed below indicates that formal legal equality had not led to meaningful access to documentation, housing, education, security of livelihood, and political voice. The paper poses the question – how far have state policies since independence advanced socio-economic and political inclusion of DNT and NT communities, especially in Mumbai, as well as issues of access to welfare, political participation, and urbanisation?

The paper contends that the shift from the criminalisation to citizenship in Maharashtra has been a genuine but incomplete one. Legal recognition and the growing framework of welfare are real institutional advances, but at the same time, administrative fragmentation in classification, low possession of identification papers, informal and precarious livelihoods, housing insecurity and the persistent discriminatory attitude of the police limit the application of formal rights to lived inclusion; political representation is less than proportional to the population concerned. The paper's value is not in uncovering new empirical material, but rather it links historical, socio-economic, governance and political evidence in a single substantive citizenship framework against the backdrop of the developments of policy since the 2017 Idate Commission report and the 2022 SEED scheme. The historical and conceptual background is laid out in Section 2, the literature reviewed thematically in Section 3, the conceptual framework and methodology explained in Section 4, socio-economic conditions and the institutional pathway to welfare inclusion examined in Sections 5–8, the Mumbai case examined in Section 8, and political representation in Section 9, while Section 10 concludes.

2. Historical and Conceptual Background

2.1 Criminalisation under Colonial Rule

The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 notified a group of communities, numbering over 100 at first and later more than 150, as hereditary criminals considered guilty by birth rather than by individual act (NCDNT, 2008; Agrawal and Sinha, 2012). The Act empowered colonial authorities to register, segregate, and forcibly settle nomadic and itinerant groups, converting communities that had earlier supplemented village economies through hunting, trade, entertainment, and seasonal labour into a permanently surveilled population. Radhakrishna’s foundational historical study argues the Act hardened pre-colonial associations between wandering occupational groups and suspicion into a codified legal category enforced through registration, roll-call, and criminal liability for unauthorised movement (Radhakrishna, 2001). Kamble, Kumar, and Roy Chowdhury’s reappraisal argues that British administrators applied the racialised language of “tribe,” rather than the more familiar colonial category of caste, precisely because it evoked evolutionary backwardness in a way caste terminology did not, presenting criminality as an inherited trait rather than a social condition (Kamble et al., 2024). Bhukya’s regional study of the Lambada of the Deccan documents how criminalisation was entangled with the colonial state’s effort to extinguish these communities’ role as itinerant traders, since settled agrarian administration had little use for mobile livelihoods (Bhukya, 2010). In the Bombay Presidency, Pardhis were among the largest communities settled in this manner, confined between 1933 and 1947 in agricultural and industrial settlements that functioned as indefinite-detention labour colonies (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012).

2.2 Denotification and Post-Independence Transition

The Criminal Tribes Act was repealed in August 1952 and replaced by the Habitual Offenders Act, which retained elements of surveillance while removing the explicit designation of hereditary criminality (NCDNT, 2008). Denotification removed a legal category but did not automatically remove the social suspicion that the category had entrenched over eight decades, a point that recurs throughout the literature reviewed below.

2.3 DNT, NT and SNT Classification

A defining administrative feature of this population is its fragmentation across categories. The Renke Commission, appointed in 2005 and reporting in 2008, estimated that DNT, NT, and SNT communities together constitute roughly ten per cent of India’s population, spread across an estimated 150 denotified communities and around 500 nomadic communities, variously absorbed into Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, and Other Backward Class lists in different states with no uniform national classification (NCDNT, 2008). Where relevant and different from the central government's terminology (DNT/NT), the relevant administrative classification in Maharashtra is highlighted here, namely VJNT.

2.4 Formal versus Substantive Citizenship

Understanding formal and substantive citizenship is key to this paper and is based on the classic account of citizenship offered by T. H. Marshall (1950), who described citizenship as a bundle of civil, political, and social rights: formal citizenship refers to legal membership, nominal rights, and the absence of documentation; substantive citizenship is whether membership is accompanied by meaningful access to documentation, welfare, public institutions, economic opportunity, political participation, and physical security. Whether denotification has been followed by formal citizenship or substantive citizenship is concerned, the question is not whether the denotification occurs but whether it has been accompanied by the administrative recognition and documentation that would prevent formal citizenship from being without any substance. Throughout, social exclusion, as defined as the process of producing marginalisation through the structural and institutional barriers despite formal equality, is used as the complementary concept. It is helpful to remember here that many of the exclusions reported here seem to be happening through the passive route – where a group is excluded through processes with no conscious intent – rather than the active route, where the policy is deliberately designed to exclude a group (Sen, 2000). This paper also draws from the work of Thorat and Sabharwal on caste and social exclusion, which further emphasises that the assessment of social exclusion must be done through three lenses – economic, social and civic (Thorat & Sabharwal, 2010).

3. Literature Review

3.1 Historical Criminalisation and Denotification

The historical background provided in Section 2.1 is elaborated in the TISS account on the criminalisation of Pardhi in Mumbai (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012), which is presented in detail in Section 7.

3.2 Socio-Economic Marginalisation

All the Renke Commission, the Idate Commission and community-level studies have shown that the literacy rates, housing, employment and living conditions for DNTs and NTs are significantly poorer compared to the national average (NCDNT, 2008, 2018). The Idate Commission was set up in February 2014 and reported in December 2017, having visited over 300 field locations, surveyed more than 9,000 households and held over 600 group discussions, concluding that some states, such as Maharashtra, had introduced targeted schemes that had had an impact in certain communities, but that deprivation was widespread and uneven (NCDNT, 2018; Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, 2023).

3.3 Welfare, State Institutions and Administrative Exclusion

One of the common themes in this literature is that recognition and documentation in the administration serve as gatekeepers to welfare, not automatic accessories of citizenship. According to Madane's analysis, the Constitution's welfare system was extended in theory to DNT/NT communities, although not implemented administratively, and benefits from Maharashtra's Vasant Rao Naik VJNT Development Corporation are also limited in practice by the lack of documentation. This is not unique to the local level but is a trend across the nation, with the Development and Welfare Board established in 2019 and the SEED scheme in 2022 being examples of both types of initiative.

3.4 Citizenship and Social Exclusion

Radhakrishna’s analysis of urban denotified tribes frames their condition in terms of competing identities and contested citizenship, arguing migration to cities exposes these communities to further misrecognition in which municipal and police authorities treat informal livelihoods as continuations of criminality rather than adaptations to urban poverty (Radhakrishna, 2007), anticipating the concept of institutional invisibility developed later. Comparative research reinforces this: Korra’s study of denotified tribes in undivided Andhra Pradesh found chronic landlessness and very low access to formal credit and government schemes despite decades of nominal welfare eligibility (Korra, 2017).

3.5 Political Participation and Representation

Scholarship on political mobilisation among nomadic and denotified communities is comparatively thin but growing. Singh’s study of nomadic communities in Uttar Pradesh traces their attempt at gaining political visibility from the 1947 Constituent Assembly debates through to contemporary party competition for their votes via welfare politics and religious appeals, even as they continue to lack a dedicated legislative category comparable to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Singh, 2021); political incorporation is proceeding unevenly across communities, discussed further in Section 8.

3.6 Urban DNTs and Mumbai

The most detailed urban evidence available for this paper comes from two related TISS studies. The first, an unpublished fellowship report by Agrawal and Sinha, enumerated 1,018 Pardhi households across 31 enclaves in Mumbai city between 2010 and 2011, using a household survey supplemented by interviews, case studies, and focus groups, examining migration, settlement, work, education, documentation, and policing (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012). The second, a peer-reviewed article by Agarwal and Sahay in Economic and Political Weekly, examined the economic organisation of Pardhi households in the Jai Ambe Nagar settlement in greater depth, with attention to kinship-based labour organisation (Agarwal & Sahay, 2013). Both describe severe housing insecurity, informal and casual employment, low educational attainment, poor possession of identity documents, and persistent police suspicion.

3.7 Research Gap

While the criminalisation, socio-economic deprivation, institutional discrimination and contested citizenship of DNT/NT communities have been well documented in existing literature, it has been scattered, and less focus has been given to the combined effect of these issues in the cities of Maharashtra. While these are some useful community-level pieces of evidence from existing studies in Mumbai, these were largely conducted from 2010 to 2013 and need to be placed within the context of the subsequent policy developments, such as the Idate Commission report, 2017, the Development and Welfare Board, 2019, and the SEED scheme, 2022.

4 The Conceptual Framework and Methodology

4.1 Conceptual Framework

The main concept of the paper is substantive citizenship, which is defined as meaningful access to rights, welfare, public institutions, economic opportunity, political participation, representation, dignity, and state protection, in contrast to the formal citizenship of having a legal citizenship status. This is complemented by social exclusion, which helps to account for how institutional and structural barriers can create and reproduce marginalisation, despite the formal legal equality. It outlines an analytical trajectory from the criminisation of the past to denotification and formal citizenship, to administrative recognition and documentation, to welfare access to socio-economic security and political participation, to substantive citizenship, and enquires where along this chain exclusion is likely to happen. Institutional invisibility is a second idea and refers to four interconnected exclusions found in the evidence:

Historical invisibility: These communities were not the same as the subjects of colonial policy but were the objects of surveillance.

Statistical invisibility: Fragmentation of classification (SC, ST, OBC, unlisted) and difficulty in precise enumeration.

Administrative invisibility: Documentation and eligibility requirements inhibit access to welfare.

Political invisibility: Limited representation means these communities have less ability to influence policy because they are invisible in the political sphere.

The paper also uses Partha Chatterjee's distinction between civil society, which comprises citizens granted rights and interacting with the state in legally recognised ways, and political society, in which the urban poor negotiate for services through informal, group-based claims, often only tenuously legal (Chatterjee, 2004; see also Corbridge et al., 2005, on ‘discretionary front-line encounters' with the state). This is a valuable addition to substantive citizenship in that it indicates how a group without formal citizenship can gain access to state resources for a certain period or on certain terms, which is the situation that can be seen in the Mumbai cases in Section 7.

Fig.: 01 Conceptual framework linking the analytical chain, the four forms of institutional invisibility, and Chatterjee's civil society / political society distinction, with the self-reinforcing feedback identified. Source: Author

4.2 Research Design and Data.

This study is a qualitative exploratory study, using only secondary sources, with a descriptive interpretation of quantitative data reported in the secondary sources (no primary interviews, surveys or fieldwork). It is based on the reports of the national commissions, welfare documents from states, the TISS Mumbai studies, and literature published in peer-reviewed journals (see references) and analysed thematically using the lens of historical criminalisation, socio-economic deprivation, education, livelihood, housing, documentation, access to welfare, policing, and political participation, with comparative interpretations at the Maharashtra and Mumbai levels.

Positionality note: This paper is written by a non-community researcher who has not been sampled from the same communities discussed and which uses only second-hand material created by non-community researchers instead of community voice that is captured firsthand. The reader should take note of the synthesis in this regard, especially for its interpretation rather than reporting community experience.

4.3 Methodological Limitation on Classification and Enumeration

The accurate estimation of DNT, NT and SNT population is very difficult due to the categorisation of different communities under different administrative groups such as SC, ST, OBC and the Maharashtra-specific VJNT category. The estimated figure of more than ten crore (100-110 million) such communities in the country has been cited by the Renke Commission and is based on extrapolating the data from the 1931 and 2001 censuses, rather than a direct count, and is likely to be an underestimate of such communities (NCDNT, 2008). The paper therefore refrains from using a single estimate of the DNT population for Maharashtra and/or Mumbai, instead viewing the reported figure of 500 DNTs in the report of the Thade Commission (1960s) or 1,630-2,083 in the census (2001) as an indicator of a high level of statistical undercounting rather than a reliable estimate of the population trend (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012).

5. The situation of DNT and NT communities in Maharashtra from a socio-economic perspective

5.1 General Patterns

The socio-economic profile of DNT and NT communities in Maharashtra, as detailed in the reports of both national commissions and community-level studies, shows that these communities are primarily landless, less educated and rely on informal and casual labour. Most of the families surveyed by the Renke Commission were faced with the problem of lack of alternative stable jobs to follow because their traditional livelihoods had been displaced by the advent of mechanisation, urbanisation and privatisation of common forest resources (NCDNT, 2008). The Thade Commission, appointed by the Maharashtra government in 1960, concluded that only about 20 per cent of the Pardhis had any land holdings in the state at all (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012), while a large comparative study into the status of land holdings by the Council for Social Development in Maharashtra and neighbouring states showed that the rate of landlessness, daily-wage dependence and formal credit exclusion for DNTs and NTs were significantly higher than for other households (Kannabiran et al., 2017).

The situation is also bleak in the field of education: the literacy rate is in the single digits in some rural blocks of the Pardhi community (from community-level studies), and intergenerational illiteracy is present in the community (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012), and the Council for Social Development survey of Maharashtra reported that only approximately 50% of school-aged children in the Ramoshi community were currently in education (Kannabiran et al., 2017). Education is often disrupted in the event of seasonal migration, child labour and, in urban settlements, slum clearances. Yet, despite decades of nominal scholarship entitlement, the lack of achievement across generations indicates that the challenge is a structural one: issues of housing insecurity and the real price of college attendance that are not addressed by these scholarship programmes.

In addition to these deprivations, housing insecurity exacerbates the problems. Communities that were displaced to the cities or that still live in the rural areas after their forced displacement are over-represented in informal settlements and are vulnerable to demolition, eviction and forfeiture of some modest capital accumulation. This insecurity is worsened by documentation issues discussed in detail in the Mumbai discussion below, as it makes it challenging to provide legal evidence of past dwellings, usually a requirement in slum rehabilitation policy.

5.2 Community-Specific Evidence: Wadar, Ramoshi, and Banjara

The population of DNT and NT in Maharashtra is internally heterogeneous, and this paper does not consider the population as a homogenous entity but refers to the community-specific research done where available. There are about a dozen principal Vimukta Jati communities, like Kaikadi, Kanjarbhat, Pardhi, Ramoshi, Wadar and Chhapparband, along with more than 30 Nomadic Tribe communities in Maharashtra, which are substantially different in their occupation, urbanisation and social organisation (Singh, 2004). In the stone quarry worker sector, which is a place where Wadar households are present in high numbers, Tribhuwan and Patil (2009) document chronic occupational health hazards, a near-total lack of social security, and variable wages depending on construction and infrastructure work. Despite most households among the Ramoshi relying on agricultural labour, Bhandalkar's work on the group shows that the traditional characterisation of the Ramoshi as a village police force as suspect has persisted in rural police attitudes towards the Ramoshi community (Bhandalkar, 2011). The Council for Social Development (Council, 2017) has recorded higher circular migration for Banjara people engaged in construction labour and agricultural labour, an observation similar to the one recorded in the survey of the Pardhis of Mumbai (Section 7) above, where they were documented but hindered from accessing welfare by the imposed nature of their occupation. The Banjara are classified as a Denotified Tribe in Maharashtra, and they were once long-distance carriers of grain and salt until it became dislocated by railways.

5.3 Gender Dimensions

The socio-economic situation outlined above is not the same situation that men and women encounter, and the literature suggests women have additional, unique constraints. Bokil's seminal work in this field asserts that among the majority of nomadic groups women's movement, marriage, and labour are more tightly controlled in comparison to similar settled agricultural communities; in many nomadic groups patriarchal control is more prevalent than in agricultural groups (Bokil, 2002). This is extended in Agrawal's next review, which highlights that despite women's disproportionate burden of the community's economic precarity, which is undertaken through unpaid domestic labour in addition to paid or informal work, gender has remained absent from academic and policy discussion. In a study conducted within a community of NT-DNT, the researcher learned first-hand that women and girls faced precarious legal, social, and economic statuses and that these barriers to reproductive health and rights were exacerbated as soon as their community identity was revealed (Pawar, 2022). This literature suggests that any gender-blind measure of substantive citizenship is likely to miss the mark when it comes to the depth of women's and girls' exclusion.

6. From Criminalisation to Institutional Inclusion

The process of institutionalisation from criminalisation to formal welfare inclusion has been a series of commissions, boards and schemes at both the state level of Maharashtra and the national level. The first sustained national study of the situation of DNT, NT and SNT communities, the Renke Commission of 2008, recommended that reservations be extended to them, on par with those for the SC and ST communities, along with implementing the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act (NCDNT, 2008), but this was not done, and the report was kept under review by the government for many years without it becoming law.

A second National Commission, constituted in February 2014 under Bhiku Ramji Idate, undertook a more extensive empirical exercise, submitting its report in December 2017 and identifying 1,235 communities as Denotified and Nomadic Communities nationally (Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, 2023). Its core recommendation, that these communities be added as a third protected category under the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act and that a permanent statutory commission be established, was endorsed in principle by NITI Aayog in 2018, though a permanent commission had not been constituted at the time of writing (Singh, 2021).

The Development and Welfare Board for Denotified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Communities, constituted in 2019 on the basis of the Idate Commission’s recommendations, is the first standing administrative body dedicated to this population nationally and now implements the SEED scheme launched on 16 February 2022 (Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, 2022a, 2022b, 2023). SEED combines free competitive-examination coaching; health insurance through Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana; community-level livelihood initiatives; and housing-construction assistance, with an outlay of ₹200 crore over 2021-22 to 2025-26 (Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, 2022a). Its four components depend on prior identification of eligible households, complicated by the continuing absence of a single national list reconciling DNT/NT/SNT community names with existing SC, ST, and OBC categories across more than thirty states and union territories (Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, 2023) – precisely the administrative invisibility identified above, in which a scheme can exist on paper while remaining largely inaccessible because the documentation infrastructure required to access it has not itself been completed.

Maharashtra’s own institutional response predates these central initiatives by decades. Madane documents that the state established the Vasantrao Naik VJNT Development Corporation to pursue economic upliftment through concessional loan schemes for small-scale self-employment and that Maharashtra maintains category-wise educational and employment reservation for VJNT candidates, recorded by the Renke Commission as more developed than in most other states (Madane, 2016; NCDNT, 2008). This apparatus’s existence does not by itself establish adequate implementation: Madane’s analysis attributes the limited benefits actually reaching VJNT households to low possession of the ration cards, voter cards, and caste certificates loan and scholarship applications require and to limited community awareness of how to access schemes that formally exist for them (Madane, 2016) the same documentation-driven administrative invisibility identified in SEED nationally, recurring in the Mumbai case (Section 7).

7. Mumbai: Urban Marginalisation and Citizenship

Mumbai functions in this paper as an urban case through which the broader relationship between marginalisation and citizenship can be examined in detail, being the setting for the most systematic empirical research available on any DNT community in an Indian city. The TISS research on Pardhis, conducted primarily between 2010 and 2013, allows the analytical chain from documentation through welfare access to socio-economic security to be traced with unusual precision for a single community, though findings cannot be generalised without qualification to every DNT/NT community in the city. The primary source for this section, Agrawal and Sinha (2012), is an unpublished fellowship report now over a decade old, and its quantitative findings – while widely cited – have not been independently replicated by more recent Mumbai-specific research; this limitation is noted here and revisited in Section 10.

7.1 Migration and Settlement

Pardhi migration to Mumbai has been driven overwhelmingly by conditions of rural distress rather than any single dramatic event. The drought of 1972-73, which was an event in the history of Maharashtra and is known as 'dushkal' (famine) in the community, is often referred to as the 'beginning' of their grandparents' migration, especially by families whose native villages were in the Solapur, Osmanabad, and Parbhani districts (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012). This push was further exacerbated by the lack of land, inability to get jobs and lack of development in the Marathwada region, while the city environment also provided pull factors such as availability of more regular jobs and anonymity for some families, which translates to less police surveillance reported in village areas (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012). A few households reported stigma specifically as the reason for their migration, and the majority of all respondents mentioned villages as places of severe stigma, from which the city provided some relief.

7.2 Housing

The situation of the Mumbai Pardhis with regards to housing clearly shows how insecure it is for them to pass it on to the next generation. The 2012 TISS survey revealed that 74 per cent of the enumerated Pardhi families lived in non-notified and legally unregularised settlements, and only over half lived in secured shelter either in regularised slums or in public housing (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012). Even those who were shifted into the government rehabilitation houses after infrastructure projects experienced greater distance to workplaces, overcrowding due to the creation of new households by the younger generation in the same houses, and lack of housing policy provisions for the rights of the next generations (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012). Systematically, Mumbai's slum rehabilitation policy disadvantaged Pardhi households, as low literacy rates, frequent housing shifts for construction activities and multiple slum demolitions had left most families without the necessary papers to prove their residency prior to the cut-off date on 1st January 1995 (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012).

This cut-off set, following a change of state government in 1995, was intended to close rather than continually reopen the register of recognised slum dwellers, a closure that structurally disadvantages populations whose settlement has been recent, mobile, or repeatedly disrupted by demolition (Singh & Das, 1995). Björkman’s study of a Mumbai housing colony’s transformation into an officially designated illegal slum shows that the boundary between formal and informal settlement is not a fixed technical fact but an outcome of ongoing political contest (Björkman, 2014), while Roy’s theorisation of urban informality frames this as a form of state power exercised through unmapping, in which a settlement’s selective absence from official planning documents becomes an instrument for managing and, where convenient, erasing informal claims to urban space (Roy, 2009, 2011).

7.3 Livelihood and Employment

Casual wage labour and self-employment together account for the overwhelming majority of Pardhi household income in Mumbai. The 2012 survey recorded that just under 60 per cent of households relied on casual labour, mainly in construction and municipal work such as gutter desilting, while 40 per cent relied primarily on self-employment, chiefly small-scale sale of flower garlands, toys, and similar goods; salaried employment was recorded for fewer than one per cent of adults, mostly on contract as private security guards (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012). Casual labourers were paid at or below the minimum wage rate; payment was often delayed, and nearly one in ten households was able to supplement their income from begging, all of which the authors of the study believe was a result of economic hardship and not because the labourers were lacking in enterprise (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012). Near universal levels of household debt were observed in Agarwal and Sahay's accompanying analysis of Jai Ambe Nagar, where the average level of debt among labour supervisors (mukaddams) is about 50% higher than ordinary households, suggesting heightened credit constraints faced by a population that is largely outside the formal banking system (Agarwal & Sahay, 2013).

7.4 Documentation & Formal Citizenship

The formalisation of citizenship section in the TISS report is directly relevant to this paper's main theme. It identified the low prevalence of basic identity documents among the households surveyed (ration cards, voting cards, and caste certificates) and observed that in the community, a ration card was generally interpreted as an indicator of relative status, not a basic right (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012). Acquisition was focused among second- and third-generation urban settlers, where the need for official identity had become more pressing in the face of the growing need of the informal economy for documents as evidence of services, credit, and housing schemes. This is exactly what the conceptual framework describes as 'administrative invisibility': formal citizenship is given by law, but it requires a documentary infrastructure, which historically undocumented and mobile populations are hard to obtain. A second layer is the widespread rollout of biometric Aadhaar identification to support welfare delivery, which was found to be affecting large-scale systems that use biometric authentication for welfare programmes, leading to reduced fraud and leakage but generating new problems of authentication failures among genuine claimants who do not have stable addresses, consistent biometric records, or the literacy necessary to navigate enrolment (Muralidharan et al., 2016; see also Tekumal & Narasimhan, 2026, on a similar pattern among Adivasi and migrant populations). Both studies are not direct studies of Pardhi communities, but both document a pattern of documentation that is similar to the pattern that is the focus of this paper in Mumbai.

7.5 Education

The overall situation of educational outcomes among the Pardhis of Mumbai is broadly similar to that of urban Maharashtra with some differences. Among the studied school-age children, 61 per cent never attended any school in one transit camp settlement, while the drop-out rate of children who did attend school was surprisingly low, partly because parents were not willing to acknowledge that their children were absent but that, in fact, they were (Agrawal and Sinha, 2012). Housing insecurity is again a key driver: the slums are demolished, and children's education is directly affected by the loss of school uniforms and books and by the loss of a few weeks of routine to set up a new home. Educational continuity is further limited by child marriage and child labour, often as early as ten or eleven, as a result of economic necessity.

7.6 Policing and Institutional Stigma

The state's policing of the community is the most tangible institutional connection between the colonial criminalisation of the community and its present experience of the state. The TISS report records that the police routinely target PDs and their settlements for their routine suspicion related to theft, and the community as a whole is often stigmatized by association when a member of the community is caught in an offence (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012). This is worsened by media coverage which, in the same report, the review of the national English-language newspaper coverage of the community revealed, was that the vast majority of articles on the community were about theft and robbery; it was very difficult to find any articles that challenged the historical link between the community and crime (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012). It is in line with Radhakrishna's argument that urban denotified tribes suffer from the ‘criminality’ of their social identity as a colonial remnant for decades after it has been formally repealed (Radhakrishna, 2007) and Kolekar's finding that the police act on the nomadic communities disproportionately based on social identity, not individualised evidence of wrongdoing, and that this is directly linked to the inheritance of their colonial-era practices of surveillance (Kolekar, 2008).

7.7 Does Urbanisation Improve Substantive Citizenship?

Given the evidence of Mumbai, it is possible to offer a balanced response to whether urbanisation and proximity to state institutions are conditions of substantive citizenship or whether it is a condition of urban informality that simply re-excludes the earlier citizenship. There is mixed evidence to support a conclusion. In fact, migration brings some benefits, albeit minimal, such as higher urban wage rates, work regularity over seasonal agricultural labour, and lessening the likelihood of a person facing some types of rural prejudice (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012) – all of which are strongly backed by the housing, documentation, and policing evidence presented above.

Urban proximity to institutions such as the Bombay Municipal Corporation, the police, and slum rehabilitation authorities has not, on the available evidence, been accompanied by proportionate improvement in this population’s ability to make effective claims on those institutions.

8. Political Inclusion and Representation

Political incorporation of DNT and NT communities in Maharashtra and nationally remains limited relative to the scale of the population involved. Unlike Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, these communities lack a dedicated category of reserved legislative seats, and the Renke Commission’s central recommendation for comparable constitutional protection has not been implemented since 2008 (NCDNT, 2008). Singh’s research shows the demand persisted: representatives pressed the same case at a national gathering marking the fiftieth anniversary of denotification in 2002, and a subsequent delegation raised reservation demands with political leadership during the 2014 election campaign, feeding into the Idate Commission’s 2017 recommendation for a constitutional amendment adding these communities as a third protected category under the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act – endorsed in principle by NITI Aayog in 2018 without yet translating into permanent protection (Singh, 2021).

Where political engagement with DNT communities does occur, it has tended to take the form of party outreach and welfare-linked mobilisation rather than institutionalised representation. Singh’s fieldwork in Uttar Pradesh documents how both major national parties have sought to draw nomadic and denotified communities into their electoral base, with welfare politics and cultural appeals proving particularly effective among communities lacking an alternative political anchor, while some formerly criminalised communities later reclassified as Other Backward Classes have achieved elected representation that communities still officially designated as nomadic have not (Singh, 2021). Maharashtra’s experience differs in degree but not in kind: the state’s VJNT community has benefited from a long-standing system of reserved seats in education and employment, distinct from legislative reservation, but the documentation-driven exclusion from welfare access that Madane identifies suggests the same structural barriers limiting socio-economic security also constrain the organisational capacity needed for sustained political mobilisation (Madane, 2016).

At the Mumbai level specifically, the TISS research found some evidence of political society engagement, with community members participating in housing rights mobilisation alongside other categories of the urban poor, facilitated by civil society organisations such as Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan, though such mobilisation is not uniformly led by community members themselves (Agrawal & Sinha, 2012). This is consistent with political invisibility as developed earlier in the paper and with Chatterjee’s account of political society, in which the urban poor gain traction with the state through collective, group-mediated claims rather than the individuated exercise of civil rights (Chatterjee, 2004), and resembles Appadurai’s account of federations of Mumbai pavement and slum dwellers producing what he terms deep democracy, though he notes such alliances remain fragile and dependent on external support (Appadurai, 2001). Harriss’s broader survey of urban-poor political participation in Indian cities similarly finds engagement occurring overwhelmingly through associational and intermediary channels, with the poorest and most stigmatised groups, a category into which Pardhis plainly fall, least well served by them, since the state a marginalised community actually encounters is a shifting, decentralised set of local bureaucratic practices rather than the uniform institution formal citizenship implies (Harriss, 2005).

9. Discussion

Applying the analytical chain set out in Section 4.1 to the evidence above, exclusion is visible at every link rather than at a single point. Historical stigma persists most visibly in policing and media representation, as the Mumbai evidence demonstrates. Administrative fragmentation in classification constrains welfare access before it can even begin. Documentation barriers, rooted in low literacy, frequent relocation, and repeated demolition of informal housing, then constrain the conversion of nominal welfare eligibility into actual receipt of benefits. Socio-economic insecurity, evident in housing, livelihood, and educational data, in turn constrains the capacity to invest in sustained political organisation, and political marginalisation reduces the community’s ability to press for reform of the upstream barriers that produced its insecurity in the first place – closing a self-reinforcing circuit this paper terms institutional invisibility.

At the same time, the balance of evidence does not support an unqualified narrative of stasis: the standing Development and Welfare Board (2019), the SEED scheme (2022), and Maharashtra’s own long-running VJNT scholarship architecture together represent a more institutionalised state commitment than existed at the time of the Renke Commission’s 2008 report. Table 1 summarises the paper’s findings across the dimensions examined, distinguishing historical problems from their contemporary manifestation, the institutional response, and the gap that remains.

10. Conclusion and Policy Implications

This paper set out to examine whether the transition from colonial criminalisation to post-independence denotification has produced substantive socio-economic and political citizenship for DNT and NT communities in Maharashtra, with particular attention to Mumbai. The evidence supports a nuanced conclusion: formal legal recognition and an expanding welfare architecture represent significant institutional progress relative to the colonial and early post-independence period, but substantive citizenship remains uneven because historical stigma, administrative fragmentation, documentation barriers, socio-economic insecurity, and limited political incorporation continue to constrain effective inclusion.

The following priorities follow directly from the evidence reviewed above. First, the community classification exercise that has delayed SEED implementation should be treated as an urgent administrative task. Second, documentation and certificate camps need to be paired with outreach specifically targeted at informally settled and homeless populations, who are least likely to be reached by camp-based, location-dependent service delivery. Third, the residence cut-off dates used in slum rehabilitation schemes warrant review given these communities demonstrated difficulty establishing documentary proof of long-term residence despite genuine long-term presence in the city. Fourth, the persistent recommendation, dating to the Renke Commission and repeated by civil society as recently as 2025, for either constitutional-style protection or a permanent statutory national commission for DNT and NT communities remains unaddressed and worth renewed policy attention.

Limitations

This study is subject to several limitations. It depends entirely on secondary data, and no primary interviews, surveys, or fieldwork were conducted. Mumbai-specific data is available in useful depth for the Pardhi community but is considerably thinner for other DNT and NT communities in the city, limiting generalisability across the full range of denotified and nomadic groups in Maharashtra. As noted in Section 7, the empirical core of the Mumbai case rests substantially on a single unpublished 2012 fellowship report; while its findings are corroborated in part by the independent 2013 EPW article on the same settlement, more recent Mumbai-specific data – post-2018 municipal surveys or updated NGO reporting – was not located during this synthesis and would meaningfully strengthen future revisions of this argument. Precise estimation of the DNT/NT population in Maharashtra or Mumbai is not possible given the fragmentation of official classification, and this paper has deliberately avoided constructing a single population figure. Differences in administrative classification and methodology among the studies drawn upon further limit comparability across time periods. Systematic contemporary electoral data identifying DNT voters does not exist in the sources reviewed, constraining the paper’s ability to move beyond documentary evidence of political mobilisation. Finally, documentary evidence cannot establish causal relationships with the confidence of controlled empirical research, though the consistency of findings across independent sources, including two independent TISS-linked studies of the same Mumbai community conducted several years apart, lends reasonable confidence to the patterns identified.

Conflict of Interests

None.

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