The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, extended and consolidated in 1911 and 1924, empowered provincial governments in British India to declare entire communities - typically nomadic, pastoral or itinerant groups such as the Sansi, Kanjar, Pardhi, Lodha, Yerukula and Chhara - as criminal by heredity. Members were required to register, to report at roll calls sometimes several times a night, to carry passes, and to remain within specified areas; those judged incorrigible could be confined in settlements, some of them fenced, where labour was compulsory and children could be separated from parents into reformatory schools. Provincial governments contracted the running of several settlements to the Salvation Army and to industrial employers, who obtained a captive workforce. The system rested on a theory of hereditary criminality drawn from contemporary European criminology and from colonial anxieties about mobile populations, and it criminalised occupation and movement rather than acts. India repealed the Acts in 1952 and the affected groups became the 'denotified tribes', but many were immediately brought under Habitual Offenders Acts, and their descendants continue to report police harassment and social stigma; the Indian government's own commissions, including the Renke Commission of 2008, have documented their continuing marginalisation.
The British Indian government designated whole communities as hereditary criminals and subjected them to registration, restricted movement and closed settlements
At independence in 1947 some 13 million people in 127 notified communities were subject to the legislation, though only a fraction were entered on the local police registers at any time and fewer still were held in the closed industrial and agricultural settlements; the 1949-52 repeal is usually described as decriminalising about 2.3 million registered individuals. The descendant category of denotified and nomadic tribes numbers around 60 million people in India today.
No significant death toll is attributable to the system as such. It operated by registration, restriction and confinement rather than killing, though mortality in some settlements from disease and poor conditions was reported by inspectors; no figures were compiled.
Colonial settlement records and later Indian government commissions document compulsory residence and labour in the settlements and the removal of children of registered families into reformatory schools.
India