National Commission for Minorities: Six Notified Communities, Not Five

The National Commission for Minorities (NCM) is a statutory body under the National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992, covering religious minorities the Central Government has notified as such, worth holding apart from this site's own Special Officer for Linguistic Minorities note, a constitutional authority under Article 350B concerned with linguistic, not religious, minorities.

Composition

The Act's own Section 3 sets up the Commission as a Chairperson, a Vice-Chairperson, and five Members, all appointed by the Central Government. All members, the Chairperson included, must themselves be from the notified minority communities, a requirement worth holding precisely: this is a commission composed of the communities it exists to protect, not outside experts appointed to oversee them.

The notified list: five communities, then six

The Central Government, not the Act itself, notifies which religious communities count as "minorities" for the Act's purposes. The original notified list covered five communities: Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians (Parsis). A notification dated 27 January 2014 added a sixth: Jains. The precise point worth holding for the exam: the Act does not name any community in its own text; the list is a Central Government notification that has already changed once, so "five minority communities" is the historical, not the current, figure.

Quick revision points

• Statutory, under the National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992, covering religious minorities, distinct from the Special Officer for Linguistic Minorities' constitutional, linguistic mandate.
• Composition: Chairperson, Vice-Chairperson, and 5 Members, all drawn from the notified minority communities themselves.
• Notified communities: originally 5 (Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Zoroastrians/Parsis); Jains added by a 27 January 2014 notification, making the current total 6.
• The list is fixed by Central Government notification, not by the Act's own text, the same "current rule, not the original figure" pattern this site's other statutory-body chapters keep testing.

A question stating "five notified minority communities" as the current position is testing exactly this update; six is the number since January 2014.