This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 20 January 2014, the Union Cabinet of India approved a proposal from the Ministry of Minority Affairs to notify the Jain community as a religious minority at the national level.
The Government of India published the formal notification in the Gazette of India on 27 January 2014, issued under Section 2(c) of the National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992.
The notification made Jains the sixth community recognized as a national minority in India, joining Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Zoroastrians on that list.
The recognition followed a 2005 ruling by the Supreme Court of India that left the question of nationwide minority status for Jains to the central government, after roughly a decade of litigation over the matter. During that decade, several individual Indian states had already granted Jains minority status of their own, ahead of the national notification.
National minority status carries two concrete rights under Indian law, the right for the recognized community to establish and administer its own educational institutions, and access to welfare funding reserved by the central government for national minorities.
What the January 2014 notification changed for Jainism's standing in India was extending both of those rights to the Jain community nationwide, closing a path that individual states had already opened piecemeal over the preceding decade.