The Malimath Committee (2003) looked at ways to reform the

Correct — B, (b) Criminal Justice System in India.

The body the stem refers to is the COMMITTEE ON REFORMS OF THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM, and its own title names the subject. It was constituted by the Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, by an order dated 24 November 2000, under the chairmanship of Justice V. S. Malimath, a former Chief Justice of the Karnataka and Kerala High Courts, and it reported to the Ministry of Home Affairs in 2003 — which is the year the stem prints.

ITS TERMS OF REFERENCE are the best answer to the question, because they say in the Government's own words what the Committee was asked to look at: to examine the fundamental principles of criminal law, particularly with a view to shortening the excessively long delays of criminal trials and to restoring confidence in the criminal justice system. Everything the Committee recommended follows from those two objects — speed, and public confidence.

The report ran to two volumes and made 158 recommendations. The ones that drew most attention, and that a candidate should be able to name, were these.

A SHIFT TOWARDS THE INQUISITORIAL METHOD. India's criminal procedure is ADVERSARIAL: two sides contend and the judge decides between them. Continental systems such as the German and the French are INQUISITORIAL: the court itself has a duty to search out the truth. The Committee proposed importing elements of the second into the first, including a positive duty on the court to seek the truth rather than to rule on what the parties choose to present. A LOWER STANDARD OF PROOF. It proposed replacing proof BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT with a standard of clear and convincing evidence — a change intended to raise conviction rates, and the single most criticised recommendation in the report. RIGHTS FOR VICTIMS. It proposed a schedule of victims' rights, including a right to participate in the trial and a right to compensation, on the view that the criminal process had come to treat the victim as a witness rather than as a party with an interest.

The Committee's proposals were extensively debated and criticised — human-rights organisations argued that several of them weakened the protections of the accused — and they were not adopted as a package. But the question asks what the Committee looked at ways to reform, and that was the criminal justice system.

The stem ends on the bare article 'the' with no punctuation, as the booklet sets it, and the four options complete it.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)Educational System in India — Education reform in India has its own long line of commissions and committees, and none of them is Malimath's. The University Education Commission under Dr S. Radhakrishnan reported in 1949; the Secondary Education Commission under Dr A. Lakshmanaswami Mudaliar in 1953; the Education Commission under Dr D. S. Kothari between 1964 and 1966, which produced the framework behind the National Policy on Education of 1968; the policy was revised in 1986 and again in 1992; and the National Education Policy of 2020 grew out of the committee chaired by Dr K. Kasturirangan. Committee questions are answered by holding the chairman and the subject together as a pair, and Malimath belongs to the courts, not to the schools.
• (c)Copyright Laws in India — Copyright in India is governed by the Copyright Act, 1957, whose most substantial revision was the Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012 — which extended protection to performers, made provision for access by persons with disabilities, dealt with statutory licensing and brought Indian law closer to the international treaties on copyright in the digital environment. That reform came through parliamentary and departmental processes under the ministry responsible for intellectual property, not through a judicial committee on criminal procedure. Nothing in the Malimath Committee's terms of reference touches intellectual property.
• (d)Public-Private Partnership in India — Public-private partnership policy did have a major committee, but a different one and a decade later: the committee under Dr Vijay Kelkar on revisiting and revitalising the public-private partnership model of infrastructure development, which reported in 2015 and dealt with risk allocation between the public and private partners, the renegotiation of concessions and the machinery for resolving disputes. It belongs to infrastructure finance and to the Ministry of Finance. The option is on the page because the phrase is familiar from economic policy discussion, and it also appears as an option on another question of this paper — which is a reminder that a term recognised from elsewhere on the booklet is not thereby the answer here.

India's criminal justice system rests on three statutes as they stood at the time of this Committee: the Indian Penal Code, 1860, which defines offences; the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, which governs investigation, trial and appeal; and the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, which governs what a court may act upon. Its four working pillars are the police, the prosecution, the judiciary and the prisons. The Malimath Committee's diagnosis was that the system was failing at all four, and its two headline symptoms were DELAY and LOW CONVICTION RATES, both of which the terms of reference name in substance.

THE ADVERSARIAL AND INQUISITORIAL MODELS. Under the adversarial model, inherited from England, the prosecution and the defence each present a case and the judge is an umpire; the burden lies on the prosecution and the accused need prove nothing. Under the inquisitorial model, used across much of continental Europe, an investigating magistrate or the trial court itself directs the search for evidence and is charged with establishing the truth. The two models distribute responsibility for finding facts differently, and importing features of one into the other is a structural change rather than a procedural tweak — which is why the Committee's proposal was contested.

THE STANDARD OF PROOF. 'Beyond reasonable doubt' is the criminal standard and it is deliberately demanding; the civil standard is the balance of probabilities. The Committee's proposal of a middle standard of clear and convincing evidence would have moved the criminal standard down, and the objection was that the presumption of innocence is not a technicality to be traded against conviction rates.

VICTIM JUSTICE. The recognition of the victim as a participant rather than as a witness is the part of the report that has aged best, and Indian law has moved in that direction — victim compensation schemes and a right of appeal for the victim now exist in the Code.

The general point for an examination is that a committee is best learned as a triple: CHAIRMAN, SUBJECT, YEAR. Malimath, criminal justice, 2003.

Key facts

• The Malimath Committee is formally the Committee on Reforms of the Criminal Justice System, constituted by the Ministry of Home Affairs by order dated 24 November 2000.
• It was chaired by Justice V. S. Malimath, a former Chief Justice of the Karnataka and Kerala High Courts, and reported to the Ministry of Home Affairs in 2003.
• Its terms of reference were to examine the fundamental principles of criminal law, particularly with a view to shortening the excessively long delays of criminal trials and restoring confidence in the criminal justice system.
• The report ran to two volumes and made 158 recommendations.
• Among its best-known proposals: importing elements of the inquisitorial system, replacing proof beyond reasonable doubt with a standard of clear and convincing evidence, and a schedule of rights for victims including participation and compensation.
• The adversarial model treats the judge as an umpire between two contending sides; the inquisitorial model charges the court itself with searching out the truth.
• The Committee's recommendations were extensively criticised, particularly on the standard of proof, and were not adopted as a package.

Common traps

• Guessing from the year alone. 2003 is a crowded year for committee reports, and the year does not identify the subject.
• Choosing an option because the phrase is familiar from economic policy discussion. Public-private partnership had its own committee under Vijay Kelkar in 2015, on a completely different subject.
• Confusing Malimath with an education commission. Education reform runs through Radhakrishnan, Mudaliar, Kothari and Kasturirangan, none of whom is Malimath.
• Learning the committee's name without its subject. In this item the name alone is the whole answer, and half the pair is worth nothing.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Malimath Committee, which reported in 2003, recommended replacing the criminal standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt with a standard of

  • (a)the balance of probabilities
  • (b)clear and convincing evidence
  • (c)prima facie satisfaction
  • (d)preponderance of evidence

  Answer(b) clear and convincing evidence — the Committee proposed a middle standard between the civil balance of probabilities and the criminal beyond reasonable doubt, on the view that the existing standard contributed to low conviction rates. It was the report's most criticised proposal, on the ground that it weakened the presumption of innocence.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In an adversarial system of criminal trial, the role of the judge is essentially to

  • (a)direct the investigation and gather evidence
  • (b)decide between the cases presented by the two sides
  • (c)act as prosecutor where the State does not appear
  • (d)determine the sentence without hearing the parties

  Answer(b) decide between the cases presented by the two sides — the adversarial model, inherited from England, casts the judge as an umpire, with the burden of proof on the prosecution. Option (a) describes the inquisitorial model of continental Europe, elements of which the Malimath Committee proposed importing into Indian procedure.