When M A Sneha filled out forms as a child, two questions often left her without an answer: caste and religion. Her parents had never assigned her a caste or religious identity, and neither her birth certificate nor school records mentioned either.
For Sneha, a lawyer from Tirupattur in Tamil Nadu, this was simply the way she had grown up. However, when she later began dealing with government paperwork, leaving those columns blank was no longer enough. She wanted official recognition of what she had always known about herself — that she belonged to neither a caste nor a religion.
It took her nine years to obtain that recognition.
On February 5, 2019, Tirupattur tahsildar T S Sathiyamoorthy issued Sneha a certificate officially stating that she had no caste and no religion. According to The Hindu and several media reports, she became the first Indian woman to receive such official recognition.
