The Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Wednesday (14 September 2022) approved a proposal to add Narikuravar also known as Kuruvikarar belonging to Tamil Nadu to the list of notified Scheduled Tribes (ST).
Union Tribal Affairs Minister Arjun Munda said that government has approved the inclusion of communities that were earlier left out of the tribal list in the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh and Himachal.
The Central government has said that all the concessions available to the tribals will now be available to the Narikuravar community.
The Narikuravars are an indigenous, semi-nomadic tribal community living in Tamil Nadu. The tribe was notified as ‘criminal tribe’ during colonial times. They were decriminalised under the Denotified Tribes Act, 1952. The Lokur committee in 1965 recommended giving ST status for Narikuravars. They are classified under the MBC list in Tamil Nadu.
In the 1980s, the then-Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M.G. Ramachandran, proposed to the Union government to bring Narikuravars under the ST list. After several protests and hunger strikes, the UPA government in 2013 was forced to issue a bill to include the community in the ST list. In a 2015 letter, BJP leader and former Minister of State Pon. Radhakrishnan told the Tribal Affairs Ministry that the Narikuravar Community is “nomadic, extremely poor and one of the most vulnerable communities in Tamil Nadu, and a meagre 0.02% are graduates.” In May 2016, the Lok Sabha passed a Bill listing Narikuravars as ST.
Inclusion of the Narikuravas in ST is set to benefit around 30,000 people of the community who have been having difficulties in getting government identification documents birth certificate, Aadhar card, ration card, etc.
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