The President has
given his assent to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes
Orders (Second Amendment) Bill, 2002. With this, the Bill, passed
during the Winter Session of Parliament ending December 20, 2002,
has been notified in the Gazette of India as Act No. 10 of the
year 2003. The Act has come into force with immediate effect.
The Scheduled Castes
and Scheduled Tribes Orders (Second Amendment) Act, 2003, seeks
to amend the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order 1950 and the
Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order 1950, made by the President
in terms of the provisions of Articles 341 and 342 of the Constitution,
to effect transfer of communities from the list of Scheduled Castes
to that of the list of Scheduled Tribes as they had been wrongly
included in the list of Scheduled Castes whereas they belong to
Scheduled Tribes category. It also provides for inclusion of certain
tribes or tribal communities or groups within tribes or tribal
communities, addition of equivalent names or synonyms in respect
of certain tribes in the existing lists, exclusion of certain
communities from the existing lists, bifurcation and clubbing
of entries in the existing lists, based on their ethnic dissimilarity
or similarity, removal of area restrictions in respect of certain
specific tribes in the existing lists and imposition of area restrictions
in respect of certain castes, correction in the spellings of certain
tribes in the existing lists and change of nomenclature of certain
tribes in the existing lists.
These changes have
been made in relation to the States of Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal
Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Goa, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand,
Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Manipur, Mizoram,
Orissa, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.
