Critically examine the concept of Scheduled Tribe (ST) and mention the limitations of administrator’s criteria. (Answer in 250 words)

- Critically examine the concept of Scheduled Tribe (ST) and mention the limitations of administrator’s criteria. (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
The Scheduled Tribe is an administrative list, not an anthropological definition. The Constitution nowhere says what a tribe is, and the criteria used to fill the list were never designed to bear the weight now placed on them.

Body
1. How the category is constituted: Article 366(25) defines Scheduled Tribes as the tribes or tribal communities deemed to be such under Article 342, which empowers the President to specify them for a State by public notification after consulting the Governor, thereafter alterable only by Parliament. The category descends from the primitive tribes of the 1931 Census and the backward tribes of the 1935 Act. It governs reservation, PESA, the Forest Rights Act and the Fifth and Sixth Schedules.
2. The criteria applied: the five tests of the Lokur Committee of 1965 — indications of primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with the community at large, and backwardness. They have never been formally revised.
3. Their limitations: the language is colonial and pejorative, and shyness of contact and isolation now describe almost no one. The tests are circular, since being listed is itself the evidence of tribeness. They produce inconsistency across state lines, the Banjara or Lambada being Scheduled Tribe in Telangana and not in Maharashtra, and they leave nomadic and denotified communities outside the list altogether while influential groups lobby their way in. Ghurye's backward Hindus and Bailey's tribe-caste continuum show the boundary was always doubtful.
4. What a defensible criterion needs: the Xaxa Committee of 2014 recommended replacing the Lokur tests with self-identification joined to measurable deprivation and distinctiveness.

Conclusion
The concept survives because it distributes entitlements, not because it describes a social type. A defensible list would be evidence-based, periodically revised, and capable of removal as well as addition.