Bombay High Court: residence in a Union Territory, not an ancestor's state of origin, decides ST reservation there

The Bombay High Court has quashed a decision treating a NEET-UG candidate as a 'migrant' and excluding him from the Scheduled Tribe merit list for an MBBS seat in Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. The petitioner was born in the Union Territory in 2008, had lived there his whole life, held a Scheduled Tribe certificate for the Dhodia community and a domicile certificate from the local Mamlatdar, and was treated as ST throughout his schooling. The authorities nonetheless altered his status to Unreserved on the ground that his father's ancestral ST certificate had originally been issued in Gujarat, branding him a 'migrant' not entitled to the Union Territory's ST reservation.

Following the Supreme Court's ruling in Abhinav Dipakbhai Patel and its own earlier decision in Dipak Kumar Jagubhai Patel, the Court held that entitlement to Scheduled Tribe status under the Presidential Order applicable to the Union Territory turns on residence in that Union Territory, not on where an ancestor's certificate was first issued; a person recognised as ST in one State does not carry that status on migrating to another State or Union Territory, but equally, a person who has resided in the Union Territory since birth cannot be treated as a migrant and denied its reservation merely because a forebear's certificate names a different State. The Court quashed the exclusion and directed the allotment of one ST seat to the petitioner for the 2026-27 academic year.