Constitutional and Statutory Bodies

Article 88 is the governing provision. It gives the Attorney General the right to speak in, and otherwise to take part in the proceedings of, either House, any joint sitting of the Houses, and any committee of Parliament of which he may be named a member, but expressly denies him the right to vote.

• Statement 1 is correct on the words take part in the proceedings, which Article 88 uses.
• Statement 2 is correct, and is the discriminating item in the set: the article contemplates his being named a member of a committee, so committee membership is available to him even though he is not a Member of Parliament.
• Statement 3 is correct, the right to speak being the first right the article confers.
• Statement 4 is incorrect, the denial of the vote being the express exception in Article 88 and the natural consequence of his not being an elected member of either House. The official answer (c), one, two and three, follows. The elimination route runs through the vote: statement 4 appears only in option (b), so recognising that the Attorney General cannot vote removes (b) but does not settle the answer, and the item is finally decided by whether the candidate knows that committee membership is permitted, which is the fact separating (c) from (d).

The question turns on the three way classification of Indian public bodies into constitutional, statutory and extra constitutional or executive.

• Item 1, the National Development Council, was set up by a Cabinet resolution of August 1952 and has no constitutional or statutory basis, so it does not find mention in the Constitution.
• Item 2, the Planning Commission, was set up by a Government of India resolution of March 1950 and likewise has no constitutional or statutory basis, a point pressed repeatedly in the debate on its authority over State finances.
• Item 3, the Zonal Councils, is the item the question is really testing, because it looks constitutional and is not: the five Zonal Councils were created by sections 15 to 22 of the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, and are therefore statutory bodies. The North Eastern Council, similarly, is statutory, under an Act of 1971. Statutory is not constitutional, and the question asks only about mention in the Constitution. All three therefore fail to find mention, and the official answer is (d). The clean elimination route does not exist here, since the candidate must be sure of Zonal Councils independently; a candidate who knows only that the Planning Commission and the National Development Council are executive creations is left choosing between (a) and (d).

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The National Development Council was constituted by a Cabinet resolution of August 1952 as a body distinct from and superior to the Planning Commission, comprising the Prime Minister, Union Ministers, the Chief Ministers of all States and the members of the Planning Commission, and its function was to review the working of the National Plan and approve it. A body chaired by the Prime Minister and containing every Chief Minister cannot be an organ of a body that was itself created by executive resolution and chaired by the Prime Minister; the relationship runs the other way, the Commission preparing the Plan and the Council approving it.
• Statement 2 is correct: economic and social planning is entry 20 of List III, the Concurrent List, which is the constitutional basis on which the Union legislates and plans in a field that touches State subjects, and it is the entry most often cited in the debate over the Planning Commission's authority.
• Statement 3 is correct: Article 243G, inserted by the Constitution (Seventy third Amendment) Act, 1992, provides that the Legislature of a State may endow Panchayats with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as institutions of self government, including with respect to the preparation of plans for economic development and social justice, and Article 243ZD provides for District Planning Committees to consolidate those plans. The official answer (b) follows.
• Statement 1 is both the eliminating and the decisive statement, appearing as it does in options (a), (c) and (d), so establishing it as false answers the question by itself.

The National Legal Services Authority was constituted under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987, which was itself enacted to give effect to Article 39A, inserted by the Forty second Amendment, directing the State to secure that the operation of the legal system promotes justice on a basis of equal opportunity and to provide free legal aid so that opportunities for securing justice are not denied by reason of economic or other disabilities.

• Statement 1 is correct and reproduces that object almost in the words of the article: section 12 of the Act sets out the eligible categories, which include members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, women, children, victims of trafficking, persons with disabilities, industrial workmen, persons in custody and persons below a prescribed income.
• Statement 2 is correct: the Authority lays down policies and principles for making legal services available and frames the most effective and economical schemes, and the State Legal Services Authorities, with the District Authorities and Taluk Legal Services Committees below them, give effect to them, so the structure is a hierarchy running from the national body down to the taluk. The Authority also organises Lok Adalats, whose awards are deemed decrees of a civil court and are final and non appealable. Both statements being correct, the official answer is (c). There is no elimination route, but neither statement asserts anything narrow or numerical, and both describe the body in the terms it uses of itself, which is the mark of statements that are meant to be accepted.

The National Development Council, constituted by the Cabinet resolution of 6 August 1952, comprised the Prime Minister as Chairman, all Union Cabinet Ministers, the Chief Ministers of all States, the Chief Ministers or Administrators of Union Territories, and the members of the Planning Commission.

• Items 1, 3 and 4 are therefore members and the official answer is (b).
• Item 2, the Chairman of the Finance Commission, is not a member, and the exclusion is principled rather than accidental. The Finance Commission is a constitutional body under Article 280, appointed afresh every five years to recommend the distribution of the net proceeds of taxes between the Union and the States and the principles governing grants in aid, and its independence from the executive is the source of its authority; making its Chairman a member of a body that approves the Plan would compromise exactly that independence. The two institutions dealt with different halves of the transfer system, the Finance Commission with non Plan revenue transfers and the Planning Commission through the National Development Council with Plan assistance, and the separation between them was a defining and much criticised feature of the arrangement. The elimination route is item 2, which appears in options (a), (c) and (d), so a candidate who holds the constitutional independence of the Finance Commission answers the question from that single idea.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Article 324(2) provides that the Election Commission shall consist of the Chief Election Commissioner and such number of other Election Commissioners as the President may from time to time fix, so the size is not constitutionally fixed at any number. The Commission functioned as a single member body from 1950 until 1989, briefly became three member, reverted to single member, and has been a three member body continuously since October 1993. It has never been a five member body.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the more important error. The superintendence, direction and control of elections is vested by Article 324 in the Election Commission, and the announcement of the poll schedule is the Commission's own act; indeed the announcement is the moment from which the Model Code of Conduct operates. Vesting that function in the Union Ministry of Home Affairs would place the conduct of elections under the government of the day and would defeat the independence the article was drafted to secure.
• Statement 3 is correct. Under paragraph 15 of the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968, the Commission decides disputes between rival sections of a recognised political party claiming to be that party, including the allotment of the party symbol, and its decision binds the rival groups. Rejecting statement 2 eliminates (a), (b) and (c) in one step and yields (d). Governing principle: functions that would compromise electoral independence if held by the executive are, almost without exception, vested in the Commission.

• Statement 1 is correct. The Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 consolidated a scattered body of food law and repealed the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954 along with several commodity specific orders covering fruit products, milk and milk products, meat, vegetable oil products and solvent extracted oil. The shift was one of approach as well as of statute: from detecting adulteration after the fact to setting science based standards and licensing food businesses.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India is a statutory body created by section 4 of the same Act, headed by a Chairperson of the rank of Secretary to the Government of India and run by a Chief Executive Officer. It functions under the administrative aegis of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare but is not placed under the Director General of Health Services, who heads a separate technical directorate. Elimination route: the object of creating a statutory authority with its own Chairperson and Board is to give it a measure of independence from the departmental hierarchy, so subordinating it to a directorate official would defeat the design; that reasoning rejects statement 2 without recall of the organogram, leaving (a) and (d), and statement 1 is standard.

Hence (a).

The Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board was established under the PNGRB Act, 2006, and its jurisdiction is defined by a clean upstream and downstream divide. The Board regulates the refining, processing, storage, transportation, distribution, marketing and sale of petroleum, petroleum products and natural gas, which are the midstream and downstream segments. The Act expressly excludes the production of crude oil and natural gas from its remit, since exploration and production are governed by the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons and the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas under the licensing and production sharing framework. Applying that divide, activity II is regulated and activity III is regulated, while activity I and activity IV both fall on the excluded upstream side. Two activities therefore qualify, giving (b).

• Option (a) understates by dropping one of the two downstream activities.
• Options (c) and (d) each pull at least one production activity into the Board's jurisdiction, which the Act specifically carves out. The rationale for the exclusion is that upstream production is governed by contractual licensing terms rather than by tariff and access regulation, which is what an economic regulator of this kind exists to do.

• Statement III is correct and is the only one that survives: the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 provides that the Chairperson or a Member shall not be less than forty five years of age on the date of assuming office.
• Statement I is incorrect: the Act extends to public servants in and outside India, so Indian public servants posted abroad are covered, and the Act also applies to Indian citizens outside India in respect of offences under it.
• Statement II is incorrect in its second limb: while the disqualification relating to membership of Parliament or a State or Union Territory legislature is accurate, the Chairperson need not be the Chief Justice of India. The Act permits the Chairperson to be a former Chief Justice of India, a former Judge of the Supreme Court, or an eminent person of impeccable integrity and outstanding ability with specified expertise, so the word only makes the statement false.
• Statement IV is incorrect: the Act expressly permits inquiry into allegations against a sitting Prime Minister, subject to safeguards. Matters relating to international relations, external and internal security, public order, atomic energy and space are excluded, the inquiry must be held in camera, and it requires approval of a Full Bench with at least two thirds of members concurring. Only III holds, giving (a).