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Madras High Court. File
| Photo Credit: GANESAN V
The Madras High Court has directed the Tamil Nadu government to come up with a manual on issuing community certificates, conforming to the orders passed by the Supreme Court as well as the High Court on this issue, and also to the various government orders, circulars, letters and clarifications issued from time to time.
Justices R. Subramanian and K. Kumaresh Babu ordered that the manual should be published within eight weeks in order to ensure that genuine applicants for community certificates do not have to undergo any hassle and that imposters do not have their way by making bogus claims of belonging to Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes.
The judges also ordered that the government conduct sensitization programmes for officials in-charge of issuing the community certificates in order to apprise them of the various court verdicts touching upon the manner in which verification should be carried out before issuing or denying such certificates.
Authoring the verdict for the Division Bench in a case for the seeking of a Scheduled Tribe certificate, Justice Babu observed that the State legislature had so far not enacted a law to control the menace of bogus claims for community certificates though the Supreme Court had made a suggestion to this effect long ago.
He recalled that in Kumari Madhuri Patil versus Union of India (1994), the Supreme Court had laid down elaborate guidelines including the constitution of caste certificate scrutiny committees, establishment of vigilance cells to verify complaints of bogus certificates and prosecution of those found to have made false claims.
Subsequently, the Madras High Court had issued supplemental guidelines in two different judgements passed in 2016. These guidelines warned the certificate issuing authorities against rejecting the claim of those belonging to Kuruman, a Scheduled Tribe, in the mistaken belied that they belonged to Kurumbar, a Most Backward Community.
Thereafter, in its latest verdict on this issue, the High Court had found infirmities in the functioning of the State-Level Scrutiny Committee. It directed the committee to assign reasons for differing with the view taken by the district-level vigilance cells and take a call only after issuing a notice to the claimants if the vigilance cell reports were doubtful.
It was made clear that the committee should not rely solely upon the report of an anthropologist and that the report could only be one of the several factors taken into consideration to arrive at a decision. The court further ordered that a community certificate should not be denied to a person if the certificate issued to his/her parents or siblings had already been verified by the scrutiny committee.
In order to consolidate all these verdicts as well as the government orders, circulars and letters on the subject, the judges have now ordered creation of a compendium which could serve as a guide for the officials in-charge of issuing the community certificates as well as those who are part of the vigilance cells and the State-level scrutiny committee.
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