Social Justice and Rights Legislation

Section 6(1) of the Act is explicit: the Gram Sabha shall be the authority to initiate the process for determining the nature and extent of individual or community forest rights or both that may be given to the forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers. It receives and consolidates claims, prepares a map delineating the area of each recommended claim, and passes a resolution which it forwards to the Sub Divisional Level Committee.

• Option (d) is therefore correct.
• Options (b) and (c) are incorrect because the district and sub divisional revenue machinery enters the process only at the later verification and approval stages: the Sub Divisional Level Committee examines the Gram Sabha resolution and the District Level Committee gives final approval, so the Collector reviews but does not initiate.
• Option (a) is incorrect and inverts the purpose of the statute. The Forest Rights Act was enacted on the premise, recorded in its own preamble, that the forest rights of forest dwelling communities had not been adequately recognised during consolidation of State forests, so vesting the initiating power in the Forest Department would restore the very authority the Act was meant to displace. The governing principle, and the elimination route, is that this Act works downward from the community rather than upward from the administration, which places the Gram Sabha at the start of the process and the bureaucracy at the end of it.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Section 23(1) of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 provides that the minimum qualifications for a teacher shall be those laid down by an academic authority authorised by the Central Government, and that authority is the National Council for Teacher Education, not a State Council of Teacher Education. The design is deliberate, since a nationally uniform floor was the point; States may relax only in the manner the Act permits.
• Statement 2 is correct. Under the qualifications notified by the National Council for Teacher Education pursuant to section 23, a candidate for the primary stage must pass the Teacher Eligibility Test conducted by the appropriate Government in accordance with NCTE guidelines, in addition to holding the prescribed academic and professional qualification.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. The great majority of teacher education institutions in India are privately managed and self financing, a pattern the Justice Verma Commission examined critically; institutions directly under State Governments are a small minority, nowhere near 90 per cent. Elimination route: statements 1 and 3 both make sweeping attributions to State Governments, and the whole architecture of the Act runs the other way, towards a central academic authority; rejecting either one leaves only (b) and (d), and rejecting both settles it.

Hence (b).

• Statement 1 is correct. PVTGs are distributed across eighteen States and the Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where the Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa, Sentinelese and Shompen are all notified.
• Statement 2 is correct. The Dhebar Commission criteria, carried forward by the Government of India, are a pre agricultural level of technology, a stagnant or declining population, extremely low literacy and a subsistence level of economy, and the demographic criterion is the one the statement names.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the eliminator. The number of PVTGs officially notified is seventy five, not ninety five, a figure that has been stable since the category was renamed from Primitive Tribal Groups in 2006.
• Statement 4 is correct. The Irular of Tamil Nadu and Kerala and the Konda Reddi of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana both appear in the list. Since statements 1, 2 and 4 hold, the official answer (c) follows. The elimination route is efficient, since the single fact that there are seventy five PVTGs removes options (a), (b) and (d) at once and leaves (c) without any need to test the remaining three statements.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The 2017 amendment raised paid maternity leave from twelve weeks to twenty six weeks, of which not more than eight weeks may be taken before the expected date of delivery. The entitlement is therefore not a symmetrical three months before and three months after; the statute is deliberately weighted towards the post natal period, and the pre natal cap of eight weeks is the specific figure the statement misses.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. The Act requires every establishment with fifty or more employees to provide a creche facility and to allow the mother four visits a day to the creche, including her rest intervals, not six.
• Statement 3 is correct. The twenty six week entitlement applies to a woman with fewer than two surviving children. A woman who already has two or more children is entitled to twelve weeks only, of which not more than six may be taken before delivery, so entitlements are indeed reduced. Since only statement 3 holds, the official answer (c) follows. The item is decided by numbers rather than by principle, but statement 1 is the practical route, since the twenty six week figure is well known and is not divisible into two equal three month halves.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and is the decisive statement: the Right to the City, originating with Henri Lefebvre in 1968 and developed through the World Charter for the Right to the City and the New Urban Agenda adopted at Habitat III in 2016, is a normative and advocacy concept rather than a codified human right, and UN-Habitat does not operate a country by country monitoring mechanism of binding commitments.
• Statement 2 is correct: the concept's core content is collective reappropriation of urban space and democratic participation in decisions that shape the city, as against a purely market determined urban order.
• Statement 3 is correct as an expression of the same principle, that residents of informal and unauthorised settlements retain a claim to basic services and cannot be excluded from urban citizenship by reason of tenure status. Hence 2 and 3, giving (d). The reliable route is to distrust any claim that a contested normative concept has become an agreed human right with an international monitoring body attached.

The Ministry of Tribal Affairs is the nodal ministry for the Forest Rights Act, so option (d) is correct. The allocation is deliberate and worth explaining rather than merely memorising: the Act was framed to undo what its preamble calls the historical injustice done to forest dwelling communities, so responsibility was placed with the ministry representing those communities rather than with the forest bureaucracy whose exercise of control the Act was meant to correct.

• Option (a) is the natural but wrong guess for exactly that reason, and the tension between the two ministries over implementation, particularly on the recognition of community forest resource rights, is a recurring theme.
• Option (b) is wrong although Gram Sabhas are the authority that initiates claims.
• Option (c) is wrong, its remit being rural livelihoods and employment.

Hence (d).

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Under Article 342, it is the President who, by public notification and after consultation with the Governor in the case of a State, specifies the tribes or tribal communities deemed to be Scheduled Tribes in relation to that State. Thereafter only Parliament may by law include or exclude any community from that list, and no subsequent notification can vary it. The Governor is consulted but does not recognise or declare.
• Statement 2 is correct. Scheduled Tribe status is notified in relation to a particular State or Union Territory, and often in relation to specified districts within it, so a community recognised in one State need not be recognised in another. This is why migration across State lines can result in loss of ST entitlements. Hence (b).
• Options (a) and (c) accept the false attribution to the Governor, and (d) wrongly rejects the State specific character of the list.

Only statement 2 is correct, so (b) is the answer. The Accessible India Campaign or Sugamya Bharat Abhiyan, launched in 2015, is built on exactly three verticals, the built environment, the transport system and the information and communication technology ecosystem, with measurable audit and retrofitting targets under each.

• Statement 1 fails on the year alone, since the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act was passed in 2016 and brought into force in April 2017, replacing the 1995 Act and raising the recognised conditions from seven to twenty one, with four per cent reservation in government employment and five per cent in higher education. Everything else in that statement is accurate, which is what makes the date the sole discriminator and the trap.
• Statement 3 fails on the ministry, since the National Divyangjan Finance and Development Corporation works under the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities in the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, not the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, the latter being named only because the body is registered as a not for profit company. (a), (c) and (d) each admit at least one of these two errors.

• Statement 1 is incorrect, since the administration of the Tribal Areas in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram falls under the Sixth Schedule with its autonomous district and regional councils, while the Fifth Schedule governs the Scheduled Areas of the other States through Tribes Advisory Councils and the Governor's regulation making power.
• Statement 2 is correct, since Section 10(26) of the Income Tax Act exempts members of Scheduled Tribes residing in specified areas of the North East and in Ladakh from tax on income arising there or from dividends and securities interest.
• Statement 3 is correct, since Article 243D reserves seats in every Panchayat for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to population, and requires that not less than one third of those reserved seats be further reserved for women of those communities. So exactly two statements are correct and they are 2 and 3, which is what (a) describes. (b) names the wrong pair by including the Fifth Schedule error, (c) undercounts and (d) overcounts.