EPFO APFC 2023 General Studies · Question 92 of 120

Correct — A, (a) 1 only. Statement 1 is the recommendation the Thungon Committee is remembered for, and statement 2 misstates the tenure it proposed. The committee was a sub-committee of the Consultative Committee of Parliament, chaired by P. K. Thungon, set up in 1988 to examine the political and administrative structure in the district for the purpose of district planning. Its central proposal was that the panchayati raj bodies should be given constitutional recognition, so that their existence, their composition and the holding of their elections would no longer depend on the will of a State legislature that could suspend or supersede them at pleasure. That is exactly what statement 1 asserts, and it is correct. Around that central proposal the committee recommended a three-tier system with panchayats at the village, the block and the district levels; the Zilla Parishad as the pivot of the system and as the planning and development agency for the district; reservation of seats in all three tiers according to population, and reservation for women; a State Finance Commission in every State to allocate resources to the local bodies; and a detailed list of panchayat functions to be written into the Constitution. On tenure, the recommendation was a fixed term of five years, not three. Statement 2 is therefore wrong, and the source of the error is visible in the committee's own set of recommendations: 'three' belongs to the number of tiers, and the figure attached to the term is five. That five-year term was not a passing suggestion either. It survived into the Constitution itself when the seventy-third amendment inserted a five-year term for every panchayat, with elections to be completed before the expiry of the term and, where a panchayat is dissolved early, within six months of the dissolution. With statement 1 correct and statement 2 incorrect, the code that fits is the one selecting the first statement alone.

• (b)2 only — This code accepts the statement that is wrong and rejects the one that is right, so it inverts the item completely. Statement 2 puts the recommended term at three years when the committee proposed a fixed tenure of five, and statement 1 states the committee's best-known recommendation accurately. It is worth being clear about why the tenure matters enough to be examined, because that is what makes the correct figure easy to hold. The recurring complaint against panchayati raj before 1992 was not that the bodies did not exist but that they were dissolved and left unelected for years at a time, so a committee proposing to entrench them had to fix both a constitutional foundation and a definite term with a duty to hold elections at its end. A three-year term would have been a weaker guarantee than the one the committee actually recommended, and weaker than what the Constitution eventually adopted.
• (c)Both 1 and 2 — This code would be correct only if both statements were accurate, and statement 2 is not. The committee recommended a fixed tenure of five years for the panchayati raj bodies, and the figure three attaches to something else in its report — the three-tier structure of panchayats at the village, block and district levels. Two adjacent numbers in the same set of recommendations, one of tiers and one of years, are exactly the material from which a statement of this kind is manufactured, and the defence against it is to learn a committee's recommendations as a short list with each number attached to its own noun. This is also the commonest way a candidate loses a two-statement question: recognising that the committee is correctly named and that its subject matter is correctly described, and then accepting a figure inside the statement without separately checking it.
• (d)Neither 1 nor 2 — This code rejects both statements, but statement 1 is correct and is the single recommendation for which this committee is cited at all. Constitutional recognition of the panchayati raj bodies was the heart of the report, and the committee sits in a line of bodies that pressed the same case — the L. M. Singhvi Committee of 1986 had already recommended constitutional recognition and constitutional protection for panchayat elections, and the Thungon Committee of 1988 followed it. The line ends with the seventy-third amendment, which gave the panchayats Part IX of the Constitution and the Eleventh Schedule. A candidate who rejects statement 1 is usually reasoning that a mere parliamentary sub-committee could not have proposed something so large, which reverses the actual history: these committees are remembered precisely because their proposals were later enacted.

The story of local government in India before 1992 is a story of committees, each responding to the failure of the arrangement the last one had recommended. The Balwant Rai Mehta Committee, appointed in 1957, recommended democratic decentralisation and the three-tier structure of village panchayat, panchayat samiti and zilla parishad, which the States adopted through the early nineteen-sixties. The Ashok Mehta Committee of 1977 examined why the system had decayed and proposed a two-tier structure with the mandal panchayat below the zilla parishad. The G. V. K. Rao Committee of 1985 took up rural development administration and argued for the district as the basic unit of planning. The L. M. Singhvi Committee of 1986 was the first to press for constitutional recognition of the panchayats and for constitutional protection of their elections. The Thungon Committee of 1988 restated the case for constitutional status alongside a three-tier structure, a fixed five-year term, reservation by population and for women, a State Finance Commission in each State, and a schedule of functions. That accumulated agenda became the sixty-fourth constitutional amendment bill, which passed the Lok Sabha in 1989 and failed in the Rajya Sabha, and then the seventy-third amendment, which inserted Part IX and the Eleventh Schedule and came into force on 24 April 1993, with the seventy-fourth doing the same for municipalities through Part IXA and the Twelfth Schedule. The features the committees had asked for are visible in the text: a three-tier structure in States above twenty lakh population, a five-year term with elections before its expiry, reservation for scheduled castes and tribes in proportion to population and not less than one-third of seats for women, a State Election Commission and a State Finance Commission.

Polity and governance is the largest of this paper's Part B blocks, and questions on local government appear in it repeatedly, both as committee-and-recommendation items like this one and as questions on the constitutional machinery the committees produced. The format here is the commonest statement format in the paper: two short numbered statements followed by the code set of first only, second only, both and neither, which this paper prints eleven times. That structure is generous, because a candidate who is certain about even one statement can eliminate half the options, and it punishes only those who evaluate the statements as a pair rather than one at a time. The specific defence this item calls for is a habit with numbers. A committee's recommendations are full of them — how many tiers, how many years, what fraction of seats reserved, what population threshold — and an examiner writing a false statement will almost always keep the committee, the subject and the sentence structure intact and move a single figure, usually to another figure that occurs elsewhere in the same report. The three in this statement is real; it is simply the number of tiers wearing the label of the term. Reading a numbered statement as a claim about one number, and checking that number on its own, is worth more marks in this block than any additional reading.

• The Thungon Committee was a sub-committee of the Consultative Committee of Parliament, chaired by P. K. Thungon and constituted in 1988 to examine the political and administrative structure in the district for the purpose of district planning. Its headline recommendation was constitutional recognition for the panchayati raj bodies.
• The tenure it recommended for those bodies was a fixed term of five years, not three. The figure three belongs to the three-tier structure it proposed, with panchayats at the village, block and district levels, which is where the false statement in this question takes its number from.
• Its other recommendations were the Zilla Parishad as the pivot of the system and as the district planning and development agency, reservation of seats in all tiers according to population and reservation for women, a State Finance Commission in each State for local body finances, and a detailed list of panchayat functions written into the Constitution.
• The five-year term became constitutional law. Article 243E fixes a five-year term for every panchayat, requires elections to be completed before its expiry, and requires fresh elections within six months where a panchayat is dissolved early.
• The committee sits in a line: Balwant Rai Mehta 1957 on democratic decentralisation and the three-tier structure, Ashok Mehta 1977 on a two-tier structure with the mandal panchayat, G. V. K. Rao 1985 on the district as the unit of planning, L. M. Singhvi 1986 on constitutional recognition, and Thungon 1988 restating and widening that case.
• The agenda became the sixty-fourth amendment bill, which passed the Lok Sabha in 1989 and failed in the Rajya Sabha, and then the seventy-third amendment, which inserted Part IX and the Eleventh Schedule and came into force on 24 April 1993.

• Accepting a numbered statement because the committee and the subject are correctly named. The examiner's usual method is to keep everything intact and move one figure, which is exactly what has been done to the tenure here.
• Reading the three in the statement as the committee's three-tier recommendation. Both numbers are genuine parts of the report, but one attaches to tiers and the other to years, and the statement attaches the wrong one to the term.
• Evaluating the two statements as a pair rather than one at a time. In a four-option code set, certainty about a single statement already eliminates two of the four codes.
• Confusing the Thungon Committee with the Singhvi Committee on the question of constitutional status. Both recommended it, two years apart, and the exam sometimes tests which came first.
• Assuming that a recommendation is not constitutional law and therefore does not matter. The five-year term, the reservations and the State Finance Commission all passed from these reports into the text of Part IX.

Local government is asked in this exam in three overlapping shapes. The first is the committee-and-recommendation item set here, where a named committee is paired with one or two claims about what it proposed, and the falsity is usually a number rather than a concept. The second asks directly about the constitutional machinery: the term of a panchayat, the reservation for women, the composition of a district planning committee, the functions of the State Finance Commission, or which Article carries a particular provision. The third asks for chronology, matching committees to their years or arranging them in order, where the run from Balwant Rai Mehta in 1957 through Ashok Mehta, G. V. K. Rao, Singhvi and Thungon to the amendments of 1992 has to be held in sequence. A single page covering the five committees with year, chairman and headline recommendation, together with the numbered features of Part IX, answers nearly every question this block sets on the subject. Expect the code set of first only, second only, both and neither, which this paper uses more than any other option format.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Thungon Committee, constituted in 1988, recommended that the panchayati raj bodies should be given constitutional recognition and should have a fixed tenure of

  • (a)three years
  • (b)four years
  • (c)five years
  • (d)six years

  Answer(c) five years — the committee recommended a fixed five-year tenure alongside constitutional recognition, a three-tier structure and a State Finance Commission in each State. The recommendation was carried into the Constitution by the seventy-third amendment, which fixes a five-year term for every panchayat and requires elections to be completed before that term expires.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The requirement that the Governor of a State constitute a Finance Commission to review the financial position of the panchayats was inserted into the Constitution by

  • (a)the Forty-second Amendment
  • (b)the Forty-fourth Amendment
  • (c)the Seventy-third Amendment
  • (d)the Eighty-sixth Amendment

  Answer(c) the Seventy-third Amendment — it inserted Part IX, and within it Article 243-I, requiring the Governor to constitute a Finance Commission every fifth year to review the financial position of the panchayats and make recommendations on the distribution of taxes and on grants-in-aid. The seventy-fourth amendment extended the same Commission's remit to municipalities through Article 243Y rather than creating a second body.