Reservations in India are given to the communities named in lists. The Scheduled Caste lists date from the Constitution order of 1950 and the Central List of Other Backward Classes from 1993, and each was compiled by a different body under a different law. This page sets them beside the last census to publish full caste tables, the 1931 Census of India, using the Database of Castes that Shivakumar Jolad and Gaurav Kalyani of FLAME University released in October 2026.
The 1931 Census, under its Commissioner J. H. Hutton, asked each province to identify the castes treated as untouchable, by tests such as whether a caste could draw water from public wells, enter temples or be served by barbers, and called them "exterior castes". The Government of India (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1936, made under the 1935 Act, drew its schedule largely from this work, and the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950 grew out of that schedule. Each bar is a province, princely state or agency of 1931.
Each entry in a state's Scheduled Caste list was compared, by spelling, with the caste names in the 1931 tables for the province or princely state that covered most of that state's territory. A bar shows what share of the state's entries found a 1931 name. A missing match means the spelling was not found. It does not show that the community was missing in 1931, since many names were merged, renamed or left under "caste unspecified".
The National Commission for Backward Classes keeps the Central List. Its first entries were notified in 1993, after the Supreme Court upheld the Mandal reservations in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992). Each later resolution added communities to one state's section. The bars count the entries in today's list by the year their earliest resolution was dated.
The Backward Classes Commission chaired by B. P. Mandal reported in December 1980 with state-wise lists of backward classes. Each Mandal entry was looked for, by name, in the same state's section of today's Central List.