New Delhi: Earlier this month, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) issued guidelines to all states and Union territories streamlining the deportation of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar.
The guidelines say that if a state suspects an immigrant is unauthorised, it will write to the state to which the immigrant claims to belong. If the latter state does not send a positive credential report within 30 days, the Foreigners Regional Registration Offices will deport the suspect. The authority to give the credential report lies with the magistrate of the immigrant’s claimed home district.
“According to the MHA guidelines, we have to ascertain within 30 days whether a person claiming to belong to our district actually does,” says a district collector from a state in northern India, requesting anonymity. “If we give a negative report or do not give a report, the person will be deported. As heads of districts, we are in the best position to ascertain a person’s credentials.”
The collectors—indirectly empowered to ascertain whether or not a person is an Indian national—have, over the last few years, also occasionally been given the power to grant citizenship to non-Muslim minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Afghanistan under the Citizenship Act 1955. Reportedly, until 2022, the MHA had empowered 31 collectors across different states to grant non-Muslims from the three mentioned countries citizenship.
These are not stray cases wherein the already vast powers of the collector or district magistrates, as they are interchangeably called, have been expanded by the Centre or the state government in recent years.
From the controversial amendment to the Waqf Act allowing the DM to decide whether a disputed property is waqf, to authorising the DM to issue transgender certificates. From the amended Juvenile Justice Act under which the DM is the final approving authority for adoption, to the anti-conversion laws passed by different state governments—the collector is increasingly the arbiter in crucial matters of identity, property, and religious rights.
For some serving DMs, the trend reflects the trust of the government and the public in their office, which has for decades been the lynchpin of the country’s administrative system.
However, for others, the powers vested with the unelected office of the collector or DM is deeply symptomatic of a continued colonial legacy, with the DM as “a benign despot” keeping unruly Indian citizens in check.
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Juvenile Justice Act
The 2021 amendments to the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015 that regulates adoptions took the power of issuing adoption orders away from civil courts, giving it to the district magistrate instead.
Further, the DMs were empowered to register childcare institutions and independently evaluate the functioning of district child protection units, child welfare committees, juvenile justice boards, specialised juvenile police units, etc.
According to the government, the amendments ensure faster adoption. The courts took too long to issue orders.
Anti-conversion laws
In the last few years, many states have passed or amended anti-conversion laws, making religious conversion, even through marriage, harder by placing the burden of proof of innocence on the accused.
Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Haryana passed anti-conversion laws in 2017, 2021, and 2022, respectively. While Uttar Pradesh first passed anti-conversion laws in 2021; the amendments the state introduced in 2024 made the laws stricter and more widely enforceable. Himachal Pradesh first passed anti-conversion laws in 2019 and introduced amendments in 2022 to make them more stringent.
Across these states, it is mandatory for the person seeking to convert and the person carrying out the conversion ceremony to submit applications to the district magistrate. In UP, for instance, the person who wishes to convert submits two declarations to the DM—the first at least 60 days before the conversion and the second a maximum of 60 days after the conversion, and the person carrying out the conversion must inform the DM a month in advance. The DM then orders a police inquiry to ascertain the “real intention” of the conversion.
“This gives a lot of discretionary power to the DM to approve or disapprove an application,” says advocate Anas Tanvir. “Earlier, too, the DM needed to be informed, but now you have to make applications to the DM, effectively giving them the power to decide whether you can convert legally or not.”
For instance, the Orissa Freedom of Religion Act, 1967, the first conversion law in the country, stated simply that conversion from one religion to another by “force or inducement or by fraudulent means” would lead to punishment.
However, the Arunachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 1978, which never came into force, directed intimating the DM in case of religious conversions.
The Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act 2003 first introduced a clause making the DM’s permission imperative. In 2006, the Chhattisgarh government passed a similar amendment to its law, making the DM’s approval 30 days before conversion mandatory for any person seeking to convert.
Most of the laws passed recently—starting with the Jharkhand Freedom of Religion Act 2017—follow the same template of giving increased discretionary powers to DM in matters of religious conversion.
Waqf law: DM as arbiter
According to the controversial Waqf Act passed by the Parliament earlier this year amid Opposition resistance, if the DM identifies any property as government land, it will cease to be waqf property till a court adjudicates and determines its status.
The Supreme Court, which has been reviewing the clause specifically, indicated in April that the DM might be allowed to make inquiries. Property status, though, might be in abeyance as long as a court does not decide on the case.
Moreover, if anyone declares a property as Waqf, the DM has to verify the claim under the new law. Further, the DM now has the power to oversee the surveys for Waqf land. In conflict cases, the DM will take the final call, instead of the Waqf Board.
There are other examples, too.
Under the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, the DMs must issue transgender certificates to people. In Madhya Pradesh, the state government passed an order last year allowing the DMs and the divisional commissioners a say in the appraisals of the Indian Forest Service (IFS) officers serving across districts.
Last week, the Supreme Court, however, quashed the order.
In the latest development, the MHA has empowered the DMs to determine the identities of suspected unauthorised immigrants.
Expanding powers
Over the last few years, there has been a trend to rely more on collectors, said a second DM. “In most cases, this is to increase speed and efficiency because the DM office delivers that which it has to within a stipulated period,” the DM said, requesting anonymity. “In the JJ Act, for instance, this is done precisely because the courts would take too long, and both the child and adoptive parents would keep waiting.”
The officer says that the DMs already had related existing powers in most cases, with the powers now explicitly delineated or, in some cases, enhanced to streamline decision-making. For instance, even in the case of Waqf, the collector had certain powers as ultimately it is a case of land but now has enhanced powers, the officer says.
“The trend became a bit more pronounced post-COVID, considering the enormous dependence on the DMs under the Disaster Management Act during the pandemic,” the officer adds.
An officer from the Indian Forest Service (IFS) agreed that the DM’s powers expanded over the last few years, but said it is only expected.
“The DM is the government in the district,” said the officer. “Since he is the focal point of administration, he will naturally be the central authority when newer laws and regulations come in place.”
“The DM has powers in matters such as citizenship, land, revenue, elections, census—you name it. Then, it is hardly surprising that their powers increase over time,” the officer added. “But it should not be seen as a concentration of powers in the hands of one individual because the DM office is huge; it is like an institution—it is the government in districts.”
The officer is not wrong. According to the powers officially vested with the DM, they are responsible for heading the land and revenue administration and executive magistracy, the overall supervision of law and order and security, the licensing and regulation in respect of the various special laws such as arms, explosives and cinematography Acts, etc., in the district, the conduct of elections, heading disaster management, acting as guardians of public land, supervision of developmental work, food and civil supplies, and acting as the principal Census officer of the district, among many others.
According to the Second Administrative Reforms Committee Report, the DM of Anantapur district in Telangana, which was mentioned as an example of the enormity of the collector’s powers, chairs 50 bodies. To name only four, the Irrigation Development Board, Vigilance & Monitoring Committee on SC/ST Atrocities, District Forestry Advisory Committee, and Andhra Pradesh Water, Land & Tree Act Implementation Committee are among the bodies.
“In its interactions with some of the collectors, the commission noted that many of them were not fully aware of how many committees they are required to preside over,” notes the report, published in 2009.
A colonial legacy
The office of the DM is the most concrete evidence that India has not dismantled colonial administrative structures, says T.R. Raghunandan, a former IAS officer and author of Everything You Wanted To Know About Bureaucracy But Were Afraid To Ask. “The British did not have DMs in their country. They had them in India very much as a tool for imperialism, which the Indian governments adopted post-Independence,” he says.
“This government has, of course, built upon that trend, but it is hardly new,” he says. “For the IAS, the position of the DM is the dearest, most coveted job—it is the job that defines the IAS dream … It is precisely because of the raw power given to DMs, and that has not started with this government.”
“The thing is that everyone in this country on the Left and the Right believes that unruly Indians need to be kept at bay by a benign despot, and that is the DM,” he says. “That is why there is such lore and mythology around the DM.”
However, the one difference between this government and others is that under this government, the DMs have become tools to bypass the state government, adds Raghunandan. “There is an increasing trend to make DMs answerable to the Centre … But even that is not new. Indira Gandhi did it very effectively, and at that time, you had over-zealous DMs using laws like preventive detention, etc., with much gusto.”
“The problem with the IAS is they are too careerist to let go of their power ever,” he says.
However, a third DM, who wished to remain unnamed, contends that their powers may be increasing on paper, but on the ground, they have been marginalised gradually over the years.
“There is a big difference between being made a nodal officer for something and having actual powers,” he said. “You might see Acts in which DMs’ names feature frequently, but that in actual developmental and regulatory work, power is increasingly concentrated by the political class and the police-political nexus,” the officer said. “We have no autonomy to envisage or execute any big project whatsoever.”
“You can say we have the power to ascertain who is an illegal migrant and who is not, but that is a miniscule fraction of the population we are talking about,” he said. “In developmental projects and law and order, where it actually matters, we increasingly have no power.”
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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