Article 342 is a provision in the Constitution of India that establishes the legal and constitutional framework for the identification and specification of Scheduled Tribes (STs). It was introduced as Draft Article 300B on September 17, 1949, by the Drafting Committee Chairman to avoid burdening the Constitution with long lists of communities. The objective was to ensure a uniform, legally binding process for identifying tribal populations who had historically faced isolation and socio-economic disadvantages, thereby enabling them to access constitutional safeguards and affirmative action.
The mechanism works in two clauses: Article 342(1) grants the President of India the authority to specify the tribes or tribal communities, or parts or groups within them, that shall be deemed Scheduled Tribes in relation to a specific State or Union Territory. For a State, the President must issue this public notification after consultation with the Governor of that State. The first such notification was the Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order, 1950.
Article 342(2) reserves the exclusive power to include or exclude any community from the initial Presidential list to the Parliament by law. This ensures that the list remains stable and is not subject to arbitrary changes by the executive. The ST status is State/UT-specific, meaning a community may be recognized as an ST in one state but not in another.
This provision is the foundation for the special protections and reservations guaranteed to STs under other parts of the Constitution, such as Article 15(4) and Article 16(4) (reservations in education and employment), and it connects to the establishment of the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes under Article 338A. A key judicial interpretation is the Supreme Court's ruling in State of Maharashtra v. Milind (2001), which held that neither the judiciary nor the executive can alter the list, affirming that only Parliament has the authority to make changes by law. Recent changes involve Parliament passing amendment bills, such as the one in 2024, to modify the list by adding or excluding specific tribes in various states.