MP High Court restores a DSP's 34-year-old Scheduled Tribe certificate

The Madhya Pradesh High Court at Jabalpur quashed an order of the State-Level High Powered Caste Scrutiny Committee that had, in 2025, cancelled a Scheduled Tribe 'Meena' caste certificate issued to the petitioner in 1991 for a village in the Sironj Sub-Division of Vidisha district, where the 'Meena' community alone, among Madhya Pradesh's districts, was then notified as a Scheduled Tribe. Before his 1999 appointment as Deputy Superintendent of Police, the petitioner's caste claim had undergone roughly two years of field verification by the Collector, the Sub-Divisional Magistrate, police officers and a neighbouring Collector, all of whom confirmed the certificate as genuine. The Scrutiny Committee nonetheless reopened and cancelled it decades later after a fresh inquiry, without finding that the earlier favourable verification reports had been procured by fraud or were themselves false.

The Court held this breached Guideline 13.7 of the Supreme Court's guidelines in Kumari Madhuri Patil v. Additional Commissioner, Tribal Development, read with a 1997 State circular: once a field verification validates a caste claim, the Scrutiny Committee may take no further action against it unless it specifically finds that the report was procured or is false. No such finding was recorded here. The cancellation order was quashed and the 1991 certificate restored.