Scheduled Castes & Scheduled Tribes are terms used in India to refer to a group of communities that are accorded special status by the Constitution of India. These communities were considered 'outcastes' and were excluded from the Chaturvarna system that was the social superstructure of Hindu society in the Indian subcontinent for thousands of years. As victims of such discriminatory and exclusionary practices, these castes and tribes were relegated to the most menial labour, with no possibility of upward mobility and degnerated into the most economically and socially backward of communities in the region.

The Scheduled Caste people are also known as Dalits; Scheduled Tribe people are also referred to as Adivasis.

The History and Origin of the Terms Scheduled Castes and Tribes

The hardships faced by such a large section of Hindu society (SCs/STs comprise nearly 25% of India's population as per 2001 census; this proportion has remained fairly stable for many decades) was not lost on everyone. Starting with the Christian missionaries and other Indian visionaries, the problems began to be brought out into open discourse as early as the 1850s. At this time the backward communities were loosely referred to as the Depressed Classes. The early part of the 20th century saw a flurry of activity by the British to assess the feasibility of responsible self-government in India. The Morley-Minto Reforms Report, Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms Report, and the Simon Commission were some of the initiatives that happened in this context. This was also the time when the Depressed Classes had a politically and intellectually capable leader to champion their cause, in the form of B. R. Ambedkar. One of the hotly contested issues in the proposed reforms was the topic of reservation of seats for the Depressed Classes in provincial and central legislatures.

In 1935, the British passed the The Government of India Act, 1935, designed to give Indian provinces greater self-rule and set up a national federal structure. Reservation of seats for the Depressed Classes was incorporated into the Act, which went into force in 1937. The Act brought the term "Scheduled Castes" into use, and defined the group as including "such castes, races or tribes or parts of groups within castes, races or tribes, which appear to His Majesty in Council to correspond to the classes of persons formerly known as the "Depressed Classes," as His Mjesty in Council may prefer." This decidedly vague definition was clarified in The Government of India (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1936 which contained a list, or Schedule, of castes throughout the British provinces.

After independence, the Constituent Assembly accepted the existent definition of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, and gave (via articles 341, 342) the President and Governors the responsibility to compile a full listing of castes and tribes, and also the power to edit it later as required. The actual complete listing of castes and tribes was made via two orders The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, and The Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order, 1950 respectively.

See also

• List of Scheduled Tribes