Union Executive and Parliament

The governing provision is Article 109. A Money Bill originates only in the Lok Sabha and, once passed, goes to the Rajya Sabha not for passage but for recommendations, which must be returned within fourteen days. Whatever the Rajya Sabha does to the Bill, however substantial, has the legal character of a recommendation only.

• Option (a) states exactly this and is correct: the Lok Sabha may accept or reject any or all of the recommendations, and the Bill is then deemed passed by both Houses in the form the Lok Sabha settles on.
• Option (b) is wrong because it inverts the scheme, treating the Rajya Sabha as having a blocking power over Money Bills, which is the one class of legislation where it has none; if the Rajya Sabha does not return the Bill within fourteen days it is deemed passed by both Houses anyway.
• Option (c) is wrong because there is no procedure of reconsideration by the Rajya Sabha in the Money Bill route; reconsideration is a feature of the President's power under Article 111 for other Bills, not of inter-House traffic here.
• Option (d) is wrong because Article 108, which provides for a joint sitting to resolve deadlock, expressly excludes Money Bills, deadlock being impossible by design. The clean elimination route is to recognise that three of the four options each presuppose that the Rajya Sabha can obstruct, delay or force reconsideration of a Money Bill, and the whole point of Article 109 is that it cannot.

• Statement 1 is incorrect on the composition, and the error is precise rather than gross. The Public Accounts Committee has twenty two members, of whom fifteen are elected by the Lok Sabha and seven by the Rajya Sabha, all by proportional representation with a single transferable vote for a term of one year. The statement asserts up to twenty five members of the Lok Sabha, which overstates the Lok Sabha component and, more importantly, suppresses the Rajya Sabha component altogether; the figure of twenty five belongs to the Estimates Committee only in the sense that it too is a financial committee, its strength being thirty and drawn wholly from the Lok Sabha.
• Statement 2 is correct. The Committee's primary function under the Rules of Procedure is to examine the accounts showing the appropriation of sums granted by Parliament, the annual finance accounts and such other accounts laid before the House, and in particular to satisfy itself that the money was spent on the service for which it was voted and within the authority governing it.
• Statement 3 is correct and describes the Committee's other limb: it examines the audit reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General laid before Parliament, which is why the two institutions are described as working in tandem, the Comptroller and Auditor General being called the friend, philosopher and guide of the Committee. The official answer (b) follows. The item has no elimination route on the substance: statements 2 and 3 are secure to any prepared candidate and the whole question turns on the composition figure in statement 1.

• Statement 1 is incorrect, and it fails on one word. Article 75(3) provides that the Council of Ministers shall be collectively responsible to the House of the People, not to Parliament. The distinction is substantive rather than verbal: the Rajya Sabha is a permanent House that is never dissolved and cannot bring down a government, it may pass a motion of disapproval but not a motion of no confidence, and confining responsibility to the directly elected House is what makes the popular mandate the source of the Ministry's authority. A candidate who reads Parliament as a loose synonym for the lower House will be caught here, which is what the question is for.
• Statement 2 is correct, reproducing Article 75(2) in terms, the pleasure doctrine operating in practice on the advice of the Prime Minister, so that the President's pleasure is the constitutional form of the Prime Minister's power to drop a Minister.
• Statement 3 is correct, reproducing Article 78(c), which makes it the duty of the Prime Minister to communicate to the President all decisions of the Council of Ministers relating to the administration of the affairs of the Union and proposals for legislation, to furnish such information as the President calls for, and to submit for the consideration of the Council any matter on which a Minister has decided but which the Council has not considered. The official answer (b) follows. There is no elimination route on the two true statements; the item is decided entirely by whether the candidate reads Article 75(3) precisely.

• Statement 1 is incorrect because it is half true, which is the commonest way a Prelims statement fails. The Chairman of the Rajya Sabha is the Vice President of India, who under Article 64 is ex officio Chairman and is not a member of the House, and Article 66(1) requires that a person elected Vice President who is already a member of either House vacate that seat. The Deputy Chairman, however, is chosen by the Rajya Sabha from among its own members under Article 89(2) and is very much a member of that House, which is why he may vote in the ordinary course and why a resolution for his removal is moved and voted upon by the House of which he is a part. Because the statement joins the two officers in a single assertion, the true half cannot save it.
• Statement 2 is correct and rests on a real asymmetry in the two electoral colleges. The President is elected under Article 54 by an electoral college of the elected members of both Houses of Parliament and the elected members of the State Legislative Assemblies, later extended to Delhi and Puducherry, and the word elected excludes nominated members. The Vice President is elected under Article 66(1) by an electoral college consisting of the members of both Houses of Parliament, without the qualification elected, so nominated members do vote. The rationale usually given is that the President is head of a federal polity and the college is constructed to represent the people directly and through the States, whereas the Vice President's college is Parliament itself. The official answer (b) follows. The instructive point for a class is that the difference between the two provisions is a single word.

• Option (b) is correct. The Committee on Estimates has thirty members, all drawn from the Lok Sabha, with no Rajya Sabha representation, and is the largest of the parliamentary committees. It examines the estimates included in the budget and suggests economies in expenditure, and is often described as a continuous economy committee.
• Option (a) is incorrect. The Public Accounts Committee has twenty two members, fifteen from the Lok Sabha and seven from the Rajya Sabha.
• Option (c) is incorrect. The Committee on Public Undertakings also has twenty two members, fifteen from the Lok Sabha and seven from the Rajya Sabha, its strength having been raised from fifteen to twenty two in 1974.
• Option (d) is incorrect. The Committee on Petitions has fifteen members in the Lok Sabha and ten in the Rajya Sabha. The governing point of comparison is that the three financial committees are the ones a candidate is expected to hold numerically, and the discriminator among them is that Estimates is exclusively a Lok Sabha committee of thirty while the other two are joint in composition at twenty two. A minister may not be elected to any of the three.

• Statements 1 and 2 are correct and statement 3 is incorrect, so the official answer is (c). The Cabinet Secretariat functions under the direct charge of the Prime Minister and is administered by the Cabinet Secretary, who is the senior-most civil servant and the ex-officio chairman of the Civil Services Board. Its business is the servicing of the Cabinet and of the Cabinet Committees: preparing and circulating the agenda and the papers for meetings, recording and circulating the decisions, and monitoring their implementation by the ministries concerned.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and identifies a function that belongs unambiguously to the Ministry of Finance, whose Department of Expenditure and Department of Economic Affairs handle the allocation of financial resources through the budget process; no secretariat allocates money to ministries. The governing distinction is between a coordinating secretariat, which services decision-making and follows up on it, and a resource-allocating department, which controls money, and the two are deliberately kept separate. Rejecting statement 3 removes (b) and (d), and statement 1 is beyond argument, which leaves (c) over (a).

• Statement 1 is correct and reproduces Article 77(3) almost verbatim; the rules so made are the Government of India (Allocation of Business) Rules and the Government of India (Transaction of Business) Rules, and although the article speaks of the President the power is exercised on the advice of the Council of Ministers.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. Article 77(1) provides that all executive action of the Government of India shall be expressed to be taken in the name of the President, not the Prime Minister, and Article 77(2) provides for authentication of orders and instruments so made, an authenticated instrument not being open to challenge on the ground that it was not made by the President. The substitution of the Prime Minister for the President is the whole of the trap. The underlying principle is that executive power of the Union is vested in the President by Article 53 and is exercised by him directly or through officers subordinate to him, the Prime Minister and the Council of Ministers being the real repository of decision but not the formal name in which action is taken. Rejecting statement 2 removes (b) and (c), and statement 1 being an accurate rendering of the text removes (d).

Both statements are correct, so the official answer is (c).

• Statement 1 is correct as a matter of text. The Constitution nowhere uses the expression no-confidence motion; what it provides, in Article 75(3), is that the Council of Ministers shall be collectively responsible to the House of the People, and the motion is the procedural device by which that responsibility is enforced. The device itself is a creature of Rule 198 of the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in the Lok Sabha, which requires the support of at least fifty members for leave to move it.
• Statement 2 is correct and follows directly from Article 75(3), since responsibility runs to the House of the People alone. The Rajya Sabha cannot unseat a government; it may pass a motion of censure or disapproval against ministers or against the government's policy, but a motion of no-confidence in the Council of Ministers lies only in the Lok Sabha, which is why a Prime Minister who sits in the Rajya Sabha is nonetheless answerable through the lower House. The distinction to hold is between the constitutional principle of collective responsibility, which is in the text, and the parliamentary procedure for enforcing it, which is not.

• Statement 1 is correct. Under Article 109 a Money Bill goes to the Rajya Sabha only as a transmitted Bill; the Council may make recommendations within fourteen days, but the Lok Sabha may accept or reject them, and if the Bill is not returned within fourteen days it is deemed passed. The Council therefore cannot reject or amend.
• Statement 2 is correct: Article 113(2) confines the power to assent to or refuse assent to any demand, or to reduce it, to the House of the People.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. Article 112 requires the Annual Financial Statement to be laid before both Houses, and Article 113(1) expressly preserves the right of either House to discuss the estimates; what the Rajya Sabha lacks is the power to vote on the demands, not the right to debate the Budget, and in practice it holds a full general discussion every year. The official answer (b) follows. The governing principle is that the financial subordination of the Rajya Sabha is a subordination in voting power, not in deliberative power, and statement 3 is the standard trap built on conflating the two. Elimination route: rejecting statement 3 removes options (c) and (d), and statement 1 is textbook, which removes (a).

• Option (a) is correct. Article 108 permits the President to summon a joint sitting to resolve a deadlock over an ordinary Bill, and Article 108(4) provides that the Bill shall be deemed passed if it is agreed to at the joint sitting by a majority of the total number of members of both Houses present and voting. That is a simple majority, and the device favours the Lok Sabha only because it is the larger House, not because any special threshold applies.
• Options (b), (c) and (d) import majorities that belong elsewhere: a special majority of two thirds present and voting plus a majority of total membership governs constitutional amendment under Article 368, impeachment of the President and removal of judges, while an absolute majority of total membership is the requirement in a few specific provisions such as the resolution under Article 249. The governing principle is that the joint sitting is a mechanism for breaking a deadlock over an ordinary Bill, so no elevated threshold is appropriate; and a candidate should note the corollary that a Money Bill and a Constitution Amendment Bill can never go to a joint sitting, the first because the Rajya Sabha cannot block it and the second because Article 368 requires each House to pass it separately.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and is settled by the text: Article 53(1) vests the executive power of the Union in the President, to be exercised by him directly or through officers subordinate to him in accordance with the Constitution. The Prime Minister heads the Council of Ministers which under Article 74 aids and advises the President, and that advice is binding after the Forty second and Forty fourth Amendments, so the political reality is that the Prime Minister exercises the power, but the constitutional vesting is in the President and the statement asserts the vesting.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. The Civil Services Board, constituted in the wake of the Supreme Court's direction in T. S. R. Subramanian in 2013 to insulate transfers and postings, is chaired by the Cabinet Secretary at the Union level and by the Chief Secretary in the States. The body the Prime Minister does chair is the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet, which is the source of the confusion. The official answer (d) follows. Elimination route: Article 53 alone removes options (a) and (c), leaving a choice between (b) and (d) that turns on the Civil Services Board.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The Union Budget is prepared by the Budget Division of the Department of Economic Affairs in the Ministry of Finance. The Department of Revenue administers direct and indirect taxation through the two Boards and contributes the revenue estimates, but it does not prepare the Budget, and the distinction between the department that raises revenue and the department that frames the Budget is the point of the statement.
• Statement 2 is correct: Article 266(3) provides that no moneys out of the Consolidated Fund of India shall be appropriated except in accordance with law and for the purposes and in the manner provided in the Constitution, which is given effect through the Appropriation Act passed each year.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the discriminating statement. The Public Account, under Article 266(2), holds moneys received by or on behalf of the Government of India in trust, such as small savings, provident funds and deposits, where the government acts as banker rather than owner; payments out of it are made by executive action without parliamentary appropriation, precisely because the money is not the government's own. The official answer (c) follows. Elimination route: rejecting statement 1 removes options (a) and (d), and the item then turns entirely on the Public Account, which is why it sits at the difficult end despite two of its three statements being straightforward.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Prorogation terminates a session of the House; it does not terminate the life of the House. Bills, notices, motions and resolutions pending before a House survive prorogation and are carried over to the next session. What causes a Bill to lapse is dissolution of the Lok Sabha, not prorogation of a session. The only casualties of prorogation are pending notices other than those for introducing Bills.
• Statement 2 is correct. Article 107(5) provides that a Bill pending in the Rajya Sabha which has not been passed by the Lok Sabha does not lapse on dissolution of the Lok Sabha. The logic is structural: the Rajya Sabha is a permanent House not subject to dissolution, so a Bill whose legislative journey is still entirely within that House is unaffected by the fate of the other House. By contrast, a Bill passed by the Lok Sabha and pending in the Rajya Sabha does lapse, because the Lok Sabha's own act of passage falls with the House. Since statement 1 is false and statement 2 is true, the answer is (b).
• Options (a) and (c) both require statement 1 to be true and fail on the prorogation-dissolution distinction; option (d) fails because Article 107(5) is express. The governing principle is that lapsing attaches to dissolution and to the stage the Bill has reached in each House, never to prorogation.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. A private member is any Member of Parliament who is not a Minister, whether elected or nominated. The classification turns entirely on whether the member holds office in the Council of Ministers, not on the mode of entry to the House. Nominated members are a small subset of private members, not the definition of the class.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. Fourteen private member's bills have been passed by Parliament and received assent, the last being the Supreme Court (Enlargement of Criminal Appellate Jurisdiction) Bill, introduced 1968 and enacted in 1970. The word 'recently' and the phrase 'for the first time in its history' are both false. Since both statements fail, the official answer (d) follows.
• Options (a) and (c) are excluded the moment statement 1 is rejected, which a candidate should do on the definition alone; option (b) then requires knowing that private member's bills have historically been passed. Governing principle: the private member category is defined by absence of ministerial office. Note the trap in statement 2, which trades on the well publicised 2015 Rajya Sabha passage, that being passage by one House and not by Parliament.

All three are recognised parliamentary devices of executive accountability, so the official answer (d) follows.

• Statement 1 is correct: the adjournment motion interrupts the normal business of the House to draw attention to a definite matter of urgent public importance, and because its adoption carries an element of censure it is available in the Lok Sabha alone and not in the Rajya Sabha, requiring the support of at least fifty members to be admitted.
• Statement 2 is correct: the first hour of every sitting is set apart for questions, in the three forms of starred questions answered orally, unstarred questions answered in writing, and short notice questions, and it is the most regular instrument by which ministers are made to account for their departments.
• Statement 3 is correct: supplementary questions are those put by members immediately after the oral answer to a starred question, and they are the sharpest of the three, since a minister has no advance notice of them and must answer on the strength of his own command of the subject. Since every statement is correct there is no elimination route, but each device is standard textbook content. Governing principle: the entire apparatus rests on Article 75(3), collective responsibility to the House of the People, and each of these devices is one procedural expression of that responsibility.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. India uses the first past the post system for the Lok Sabha and the State Legislative Assemblies, under which the candidate securing the largest number of valid votes is declared elected, whatever the proportion. No threshold of fifty per cent applies, and in multi cornered contests winning candidates routinely poll well under a third of the votes. A majority requirement of that kind belongs to the two round system used in France, or to preferential systems such as the alternative vote in Australia; within India it is found only in the indirect elections conducted by proportional representation with the single transferable vote, for the President, the Vice President and the Rajya Sabha.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the decisive statement, since rejecting statement 1 leaves only (b) and (d). Article 93 provides simply that the House of the People shall choose two members to be Speaker and Deputy Speaker, and lays down no allocation whatever between parties. The practice by which the Deputy Speaker's office goes to the Opposition or to an ally is a convention that has been observed intermittently and departed from, and the phrase 'according to the provisions laid down in the Constitution' is what makes the statement false. Both statements failing, the official answer (d) follows. Governing principle: distinguish constitutional provision from parliamentary convention, since a statement that is true as a description of practice may be false as a statement of law.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The first Lok Sabha sat from 1952 to 1957 and the largest opposition party in it was the Communist Party of India with sixteen seats. The Swatantra Party was founded by C. Rajagopalachari only in 1959, so it could not have existed in the first Lok Sabha at all. This is a pure date check and is the cleanest entry point into the question.
• Statement 2 is correct. Ram Subhag Singh of the Congress (O) was accorded recognition as Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha in 1969, the first time the office was formally recognised; statutory recognition with salary and allowances followed under the Salary and Allowances of Leaders of Opposition in Parliament Act, 1977.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. The threshold applied by the Speaker under the Mavalankar convention and the Directions by the Speaker is one tenth of the total strength of the House, that is 55 members in a House of 545, not 75. The 1977 Act itself prescribes no numerical floor and speaks only of the leader of the largest opposition party recognised as such by the Speaker. Elimination route: recognising that Swatantra postdates the first Lok Sabha kills options (a) and (d) at once, leaving (b) and (c), and the well known 55 rather than 75 figure then settles it on statement 3.

Hence (b).

• Option (b) is correct. The Committee on Subordinate Legislation exists precisely to police delegated legislation, examining whether rules, regulations, sub rules, by laws and orders framed under a statute or under the Constitution stay within the authority delegated, and reporting to the House where they exceed it, impose retrospective effect without authority, or have not been laid before the House as required.
• Option (a) is wrong: the Committee on Government Assurances tracks promises, undertakings and assurances given by Ministers on the floor and reports on the extent to which they have been carried out, which is scrutiny of executive follow through rather than of rule making power.
• Option (c) is wrong: the Rules Committee considers amendments to the House's own Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business, so it is directed inward at the legislature and not at the executive.
• Option (d) is wrong: the Business Advisory Committee allots time to government business and recommends the timetable of the House. Governing principle: the stem describes the classic function of legislative oversight of delegated legislation, and the name of the committee states that function directly, so the question turns on distinguishing the four committees by object, with subordinate legislation being the only one directed at rule making power.

Hence (b).

The question is one of negative framing, so the task is to find the single statement that departs from Article 110(1).

• Option (a) reproduces clause (a) of Article 110(1), the imposition, abolition, remission, alteration or regulation of any tax, and is correct.
• Option (b) reproduces clause (c), the custody of the Consolidated Fund or the Contingency Fund of India and the payment of moneys into or the withdrawal of moneys from any such Fund, and is correct.
• Option (d) reproduces clause (b), the regulation of the borrowing of money or the giving of any guarantee by the Government of India, and is correct.
• Option (c) is the statement that is not correct, and it fails on one word. Clause (d) of Article 110(1) speaks of the appropriation of moneys out of the Consolidated Fund of India, not out of the Contingency Fund. The distinction is not pedantic but structural: the Consolidated Fund can be drawn upon only by appropriation made by law, which is exactly why appropriation from it is a Money Bill matter, whereas the Contingency Fund is placed at the disposal of the President for unforeseen expenditure and is drawn upon by executive authorisation, with parliamentary approval sought afterwards to recoup the Fund. Appropriation out of the Contingency Fund therefore is not and cannot be the subject of a Money Bill. Notice that the Contingency Fund appears legitimately in option (b), in connection with custody and with payments into and withdrawals from the Fund, which is what makes option (c) hard to spot.

Hence (c).

• Statement 1 is correct. Article 102(1)(a) disqualifies a member for holding an office of profit under the Union or a State other than an office declared by Parliament by law not to disqualify, and the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Act, 1959 is that law, listing exempted offices including ministerial office, offices of certain committee chairpersons and a schedule of specified bodies.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. The Constitution uses the expression office of profit but nowhere defines it; the content has been supplied by judicial decisions, which look to whether the government makes the appointment, whether it can remove the holder, whether remuneration is paid and whether functions of government are performed. The absence of a constitutional definition is the standing criticism, and it is what makes each fresh controversy turn on judicial tests.
• Statement 2 is a bare enumerative claim about the number of amendments to the 1959 Act, which the key accepts as correct. Since statements 1 and 2 hold, the official answer (a) follows. In the exam hall the item is decided on statement 3 alone, since a candidate who knows the term is undefined can discard options (b), (c) and (d) without any view on the amendment count.

Independent sectoral regulators such as TRAI, IRDAI and the electricity regulatory commissions are statutory bodies created by Parliament, and it is Parliament that holds them to account.

• Item 2 qualifies. The Department Related Standing Committees examine the demands for grants, bills and the annual reports and working of the ministries and of the bodies under them, and regulators fall within that remit.
• Item 1 qualifies. Parliament may constitute ad hoc committees, including select and joint committees and committees of inquiry, to examine a specific matter, and such committees have examined regulators and regulatory failures.
• Item 3 does not qualify. The Finance Commission is a constitutional body under Article 280 whose function is to recommend the distribution of tax proceeds between the Union and the States and the principles of grants in aid; it has no oversight role over regulators.
• Item 4 does not qualify. The Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission, chaired by Justice B. N. Srikrishna and reporting in 2013, was a one time expert commission asked to rewrite the legal architecture of the financial sector, and it produced the draft Indian Financial Code; it was not a standing review mechanism and no longer exists.
• Item 5 does not qualify. NITI Aayog is an executive think tank without oversight authority over statutory regulators. Since items 1 and 2 hold, the official answer (a) follows. The organising principle is that a body created by statute is answerable to the legislature that created it, not to executive or advisory bodies.

A constitutional amendment under Article 368 must be passed separately by each House by the prescribed special majority, and there is no provision for a joint sitting to break a deadlock. The two Houses are therefore exactly equal here, which makes (b) correct.

• Option (a) is wrong because Article 312 gives the Rajya Sabha a power the Lok Sabha does not have at all, namely the exclusive power to pass the enabling resolution for a new All India Service, so the power is greater, not equal.
• Option (c) is wrong because a no confidence motion lies only in the Lok Sabha, the council of ministers being collectively responsible to the popular House alone under Article 75(3).
• Option (d) is wrong because cut motions attach to the demands for grants, which are voted only by the Lok Sabha under Article 113(2).

The defining feature of the parliamentary system is that the executive is drawn from and continuously answerable to the legislature and survives only while it retains its confidence. Hence (b).

• Option (a) describes a national or grand coalition, an occasional arrangement and not a defining feature.
• Option (c) describes direct popular mandate and recall, which is closer to the presidential model where the executive is separately elected and cannot be removed by the legislature on political grounds.
• Option (d) describes a fixed term executive, which again is the presidential model or a system with constructive votes and anti defection style rigidity, and it contradicts the very idea of collective responsibility.

• Statement 1 is correct. Article 85(1) empowers the President to summon each House at such time and place as he thinks fit, and sessions have occasionally been held outside the usual seat.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the discriminating statement. The Constitution nowhere provides for three sessions. It stipulates only that six months shall not intervene between the last sitting in one session and the first sitting in the next; the Budget, Monsoon and Winter sessions are a matter of convention.
• Statement 3 is correct, since no minimum number of sitting days is prescribed anywhere, a recurring subject of reform proposals. Correct combination is 1 and 3, giving (c).
• Options (b) and (d) admit the three sessions error, and (a) drops a correct statement.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The Constitution speaks only of a Council of Ministers headed by the Prime Minister and, in Article 352, of the Cabinet as a defined body for the limited purpose of advising on a proclamation of Emergency. The gradation into Cabinet Minister, Minister of State with Independent Charge, Minister of State and Deputy Minister is a matter of executive practice and convention, not of constitutional classification.
• Statement 2 is correct. Article 75(1A), inserted by the Ninety first Amendment of 2003, caps the total number of ministers in the Union Government, including the Prime Minister, at fifteen per cent of the total number of members of the Lok Sabha. Only statement 2 stands, so (b) is the answer.
• Options (a) and (c) admit the false statement 1, and (d) rejects a well settled constitutional provision.

• Item 1 is not exclusive. A proclamation of Emergency must be approved by resolutions of both Houses within the prescribed period, and the Rajya Sabha's role is in fact enhanced where the Lok Sabha stands dissolved.
• Item 2 is exclusive. Because the Council of Ministers is collectively responsible to the House of the People alone under Article 75(3), only the Lok Sabha can pass a motion of no confidence against it.
• Item 3 is not exclusive. Impeachment of the President under Article 61 may be initiated in either House, and the charge preferred by one House is investigated by the other, so both Houses necessarily participate. Only item 2 qualifies, giving (b).
• Options (a) and (c) wrongly treat Emergency ratification as a Lok Sabha monopoly, and (c) and (d) wrongly treat presidential impeachment the same way.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Article 88 confers on the Attorney General alone the right to speak in and otherwise take part in the proceedings of either House, any joint sitting, and any committee of Parliament of which he is named a member, though without a right to vote. The Solicitor General enjoys no such constitutional right; that office is a statutory and executive appointment as a law officer, not a constitutional office under Article 76. Coupling the two in a single claim of exclusivity is therefore wrong.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. The Constitution provides only that the Attorney General holds office during the pleasure of the President and receives such remuneration as the President determines. It lays down no procedure for resignation and says nothing about the fall of the government. The practice by which the Attorney General resigns when the government that advised his appointment leaves office is a convention, and the statement's attribution of it to the Constitution is what makes it false. Both statements failing, (d) is correct, and options (a), (b) and (c) each accept at least one false statement.

• Statement 1 is correct. Rule 8 of the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in Lok Sabha provides that the election of the Deputy Speaker shall be held on such date as the Speaker may fix, which is the very provision at the heart of the controversy over the office being left vacant.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. Article 93 requires only that the House choose two members to be Speaker and Deputy Speaker; the practice since the fourth Lok Sabha of offering the post to the opposition is a convention and carries no mandatory force, and nothing confines the choice to the principal opposition party or the ruling party.
• Statement 3 is correct. When presiding, the Deputy Speaker exercises the same powers as the Speaker, and his rulings, like the Speaker's, are not subject to appeal within the House.
• Statement 4 is incorrect. The Speaker does not move motions of this kind; a member gives notice of the motion and another member seconds it, and the description of the Speaker moving and the Prime Minister seconding is not the established practice.
• Statements 1 and 3 hold, so (a) is correct, and options (b), (c) and (d) each admit one of the two invented propositions.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Article 71(2) expressly saves acts done by the President in the exercise of the powers of the office before the date of a decision declaring the election void, which protects governmental continuity.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. Article 62(1) requires the election to fill a vacancy caused by expiry of the term to be completed before the expiry, and Article 71(4) provides that the election cannot be questioned on the ground that the electoral college was incomplete for any reason, so dissolved Assemblies furnish no ground for postponement.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. The Constitution prescribes no time limit for the President to declare assent to a Bill under Article 111, the only temporal direction being that a Bill returned and passed again must be assented to, and that a return must be as soon as possible, which is not a limit. All three fail, giving (d).

• Statement 1 is correct. A Finance Bill in the ordinary sense, meaning one that is not certified as a Money Bill, is treated as an ordinary Bill so far as the Rajya Sabha is concerned, and the Upper House may amend or reject it.
• Statement 2 is correct and states the Article 109 procedure: the Rajya Sabha must return a Money Bill within fourteen days with recommendations only, which the Lok Sabha may accept or reject, and the Bill is deemed passed in either event.
• Statement 3 is incorrect, and the error lies in the word necessary. There is indeed no joint sitting for a Money Bill, since the deadlock mechanism does not arise. For a Finance Bill of the ordinary kind a joint sitting under Article 108 is available, but it is a discretionary power of the President to summon one, not a compulsory step. Two statements stand, giving (b).
• Option (c) requires the joint sitting to be mandatory, and (a) and (d) deny the settled Article 109 position.

• Statement 1 is correct. Article 109 is headed Special procedure in respect of Money Bills and sets out the whole scheme, while Article 110 defines what a Money Bill is.
• Statement 2 is correct. A Money Bill may be introduced only in the Lok Sabha, and only on the recommendation of the President.
• Statement 3 is correct. The Rajya Sabha must return the Bill within fourteen days and may recommend amendments, but it cannot reject the Bill, and if it fails to return it within fourteen days the Bill is deemed passed by both Houses.
• Statement 4 is incorrect and is the discriminator. The Lok Sabha may accept or reject any or all of the recommendations, and if it rejects them the Bill is deemed passed in its original form. Making the recommendations binding would convert the Rajya Sabha's advisory role into a veto, which is exactly what the Money Bill procedure is designed to exclude.

Hence 1, 2 and 3, which is (c).

• Statement 1 is correct. The Ethics Committee of the Lok Sabha was constituted as an ad hoc committee in 2000 and became a permanent standing committee only in 2015.
• Statement 3 is correct. The Committee does not take up matters that are sub judice, so as to avoid interference with judicial proceedings.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. Any person may make a complaint against a member, not only a fellow member. Where the complainant is not a member, the complaint is routed through a member, but the right to complain is not confined to members, which is what the statement asserts. Hence 1 and 3 only, which is (c).
• Options (a) and (d) admit the false restriction on complainants, and (b) drops the correct point about the Committee's ad hoc origins.

• Statement 1 is correct. Under Article 96, the Speaker shall not preside while a resolution for his removal is under consideration, the Deputy Speaker or another member taking the chair.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. The Speaker retains the right to speak in and otherwise take part in the proceedings, and indeed to be heard in his own defence, which is a basic requirement of natural justice.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the harder point. The Speaker is entitled to vote on the resolution in the first instance, that is as an ordinary member. What he loses is the casting vote in the event of an equality of votes, which he would exercise as presiding officer but cannot exercise here.
• Statement 3 asserts precisely the opposite of the constitutional position. Hence 1 only, which is (a).
• Options (b), (c) and (d) each admit at least one of the two false statements, and the distinction between an ordinary vote in the first instance and a casting vote on a tie is what the question is built on.

• Statement 1 is correct. A bill pending in the Lok Sabha, whether originating there or transmitted from the Rajya Sabha, lapses on dissolution.
• Statement 2 is correct. A bill passed by the Lok Sabha but still pending in the Rajya Sabha also lapses, because the House that passed it has ceased to exist.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the exception the question tests. Where the President has notified an intention to summon a joint sitting under Article 108, the bill does not lapse on dissolution, since the joint sitting mechanism must be allowed to run its course. Hence 1 and 2, which is (b). The general principle is that a bill dies with the House that is dissolved, and the exceptions are bills pending only in the Rajya Sabha and not passed by the Lok Sabha, bills already passed by both Houses and awaiting assent, and bills for which a joint sitting has been notified.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Prorogation is effected by the President under Article 85, and like almost all presidential functions it is exercised on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers under Article 74. Treating it as a discretionary power is the error the question is built around.
• Statement 2 is correct. In practice prorogation follows adjournment sine die by the presiding officer, but there is no constitutional bar on prorogating a House while it is in session, and this has occurred.
• Statement 3 is correct. Dissolution of the Lok Sabha is likewise a presidential act on ministerial advice, with the qualification that in exceptional situations, such as where the Prime Minister has lost majority support, the President may exercise a measure of discretion. Hence 2 and 3, which is (c).
• Options (a) and (b) require the false claim of unadvised prorogation, and (d) drops the correct point on prorogation practice.

The governing principle is Article 123(2), under which an Ordinance promulgated by the President has the same force and effect as an Act of Parliament.

• Statement I follows directly and is correct: since an Ordinance carries the force of an Act, it can amend or repeal a Central Act, just as a later Act could.
• Statement III is correct for the same reason: an Ordinance may be made retrospective in operation, exactly as legislation may be, and there is no bar on backdating its commencement.
• Statement II is incorrect, and the limitation is express. Article 123(3) provides that an Ordinance making any provision which Parliament would not under the Constitution be competent to enact is void. Article 13(2) prohibits the State from making any law that takes away or abridges the Fundamental Rights, and the word law in Article 13(3) includes an Ordinance. Since Parliament itself cannot abridge a Fundamental Right by ordinary legislation, the President cannot achieve it by Ordinance either. The ordinance-making power is co-extensive with the legislative power of Parliament, and therefore inherits its limits as well as its reach.
• Statements I and III hold, giving (c).
• Options (a), (b) and (d) each retain the Fundamental Rights claim.

• Statement I is correct. Although Article 72 confers the power in wide terms, the Supreme Court has held that its exercise is not wholly beyond scrutiny. In Kehar Singh the Court held that it would not examine the merits of the decision but could examine whether the power had been exercised at all and on relevant considerations, and in Epuru Sudhakar it set aside a grant of remission, holding that the order could be reviewed where it was arbitrary, mala fide, passed without application of mind or on wholly irrelevant grounds. The review is therefore limited rather than absent, which is exactly what the statement claims.
• Statement II is incorrect. Article 72 is a power of the President exercised on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers under Article 74, and the settled position from Maru Ram onwards is that the President acts on the advice of the government of the day and not on personal satisfaction. In practice the Ministry of Home Affairs processes mercy petitions and tenders advice. Only I holds, giving (a).
• Options (b) and (c) both attribute an independent discretion to the President that the Constitution does not confer, and option (d) wrongly denies the availability of limited review.

• Statement I is correct and reproduces the proviso to Article 94, under which the Speaker does not vacate office on dissolution but continues until immediately before the first sitting of the newly constituted House. The purpose is continuity of the office, so that the House is never without a Speaker and someone remains competent to discharge essential functions in the interval.
• Statement III is correct and reproduces Article 94(c) read with the fourteen days' notice requirement: removal is by a resolution passed by a majority of all the then members of the House, an effective majority rather than a simple majority of those present and voting, and while such a resolution is under consideration the Speaker may sit in the House but not preside, and does not have a casting vote though he or she may vote in the first instance.
• Statement II is incorrect. There is no constitutional requirement that a Speaker resign from the political party on election. The convention of severing party ties exists in the United Kingdom but was not written into the Indian Constitution, and Indian Speakers have generally retained party membership.
• Statements I and III hold, giving (c).
• Options (a), (b) and (d) each import the British convention as an Indian constitutional provision.

• Statements 1 and 2 have been swapped, which is the entire construction of the question. A starred question is one for which the member desires an oral answer, is distinguished by an asterisk, and permits supplementary questions once the Minister has replied. An unstarred question is one for which a written answer is desired, and the answer is deemed laid on the table of the House. So statement 1 is wrong and statement 2 is wrong.
• Statement 3 is correct and follows directly, since an unstarred question is never actually called and answered orally, so there is no reply on the floor on which a supplementary could be founded. Exactly one statement is therefore correct and (c) is right. (a) accepts the inversion, (b) treats the wrong statement as one of two correct ones, and (d) overlooks the sound statement on supplementaries. A candidate who spots the swap can answer without recalling anything about supplementaries at all, since only statement 3 remains available.

Every statement fails, so (d) is correct.

• Statement 1 is wrong because the Chairperson of this Committee is appointed by the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, the Committee being serviced by the Lok Sabha Secretariat, and the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha appoints chairpersons only of committees within that House's charge.
• Statement 2 is wrong because the numbers are reversed, the Committee having thirty members of whom twenty are elected by the Lok Sabha and ten by the Rajya Sabha, which is the standard ratio for a joint committee of this kind.
• Statement 3 is wrong because the disqualification of Ministers is absolute, with no exception for the Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment, and the reason is structural, since a committee that scrutinises executive action on behalf of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes cannot include the very Minister whose department it examines.
• Statement 4 is wrong because the term is one year, not two. (a), (b) and (c) each accept at least one of these four errors.