Denotified Tribes (DNTs)

For the first time since 1931, India's denotified, nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes are set to be counted in a national census. In February 2026 the Registrar General of India accepted a Social Justice Ministry proposal to enumerate these communities in the 2027 Census, answering a decades-old demand from groups that a colonial-era law once branded 'criminal by birth'. The step revives a larger question: whether DNTs, still largely missing from official data, should get a distinct constitutional category of their own alongside SCs, STs and OBCs.