ABSTRACT
Based on certain unfair grounds, some of the tribal communities in India are tagged as criminal tribes, and were not recognised by the state. These communities always found themselves to be at the receiving end of the social disparities. They are guilty and victims by their birth in these communities. They are depressed not because of their poverty-stricken conditions, but the general outlook of what the public, society and institutions have about these communities. The conditions of the 196 denotified communities (59 communities in Andhra Pradesh) are rather disheartening. The historical evidences show that the state and non-state actors are the reason for this. These tribes mostly depended on some traditional livelihood sources such as vegetable sellers, plantation workers, stone quarry workers, earth workers, baggage carriers, food grain transporters, basket-makers, rope weavers etc. During the course of modernisation and development, it constituted a threat to the identity and human dignity of certain Indigenous people. The traditional livelihood practices in the process have slowly vanished. This has led them to shift their livelihood sources. There had been no evidence in the history that government/state took the responsibility to socialise these tribes to integrate them into the mainstream society. The main thrust and focus of the chapter is to discuss the conditions and experiences of the nomadic and denotified tribal communities in India and to understand the perspectives of the dominant sections of the society that branded them as ‘habitual, criminal and juvenile offenders’ in the colonial and post-Independent India. Though the analysis of the situation of these communities is applicable to the entire Indian situation, references in this chapter are drawn mainly from the experiences of Andhra Pradesh. Thus, the chapter specifically analyses the basic features of the denotified tribes of Andhra Pradesh and implications of the Criminal Tribes Acts in various districts in Andhra Pradesh.
