The Maharashtra government has constituted a 27-member committee to examine whether members of Scheduled Tribes (STs) who convert to another religion should continue to receive reservation and other government welfare benefits.
The committee was set up through a Government Resolution issued by the state’s Tribal Development Department on July 16, headed by Tribal Development Minister Ashok Uike. Other members include Minister of State for Tribal Development Indranil Naik, Food and Drug Administration Minister Narhari Zirwal, MLAs from ST constituencies, and the Commissioner of the Tribal Research and Training Institute, Pune, who will serve as member secretary. No deadline has been set for its findings.
Its brief covers three tasks: working out where ST reservation and welfare benefits stand, legally and constitutionally, after conversion; studying how the Centre and other states have handled similar cases; and recommending a policy for Maharashtra.
The panel traces back to the Assembly’s 2025 monsoon session, when Anupbhaiyya Agrawal and other legislators raised an attention notice accusing Christian missionaries in Nandurbar district’s Navapur taluka of using inducements to convert tribals and non-tribals. Members who spoke on the notice wanted SC and ST concessions withdrawn from converts, and the Revenue Minister and the Tribal Development Minister assured the House that an ST legislators’ panel would take up the question.
The legal position for STs differs from that of SCs. SC status is tied to religion under a 1950 presidential order, so a Dalit who converts out of Hinduism, Sikhism or Buddhism can lose SC recognition. Article 342 carries no such religious condition for STs, so tribal status does not currently change with a person’s faith.
The question has been building nationally. The Janjatiya Suraksha Manch, backed by the RSS-affiliated Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, has petitioned President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to strike ST members off the list once they convert. In May, the demand found a bigger stage at a Sangh-linked Adivasi gathering in New Delhi, attended by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, where organisers specifically sought the delisting of STs who convert to Christianity or Islam.
The 2011 Census puts this in context. Maharashtra’s ST population rose from 85.77 lakh in 2001 to just over 1.05 crore, about 9.35 per cent of the state’s population. Hindus made up 97.2 per cent of this group; the rest included 1.13 lakh Muslims, over 20,000 Christians and nearly 21,000 Buddhists. Over the decade, Muslim and Buddhist ST numbers rose sharply, by 49.1 per cent and 114.8 per cent, while the Christian ST count fell by 34.8 per cent.
This is not the Mahayuti government’s first attempt to address the question. In 2023, it appointed a three-member panel to look into complaints that ST students who had changed their religion were still claiming ITI admissions under the ST quota. An interim report placed before the Assembly in March 2024 flagged 257 such cases, but no further policy action has followed since.
The decision has drawn sharp criticism from tribal rights groups and Christian organisations. Tribal rights activist Sanjay Dabhade dismissed the panel as “illogical and driven by the RSS agenda,” arguing that religion has never been part of how the Constitution defines Scheduled Tribe status.
