EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 65 of 120

Correct — D, (d) 1, 2 and 4. Statements 1, 2 and 4 are all true of Cornwallis's police arrangements, and only statement 3 fails. The booklet prints the word daroga in italics in statements 2, 3 and 4. Statement 1 is correct. On 7 December 1792 Cornwallis imposed police regulations on the Bengal collectorate areas — what are today West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha in India, and Bangladesh — ending policing through the zamindars, and the regulations were re-enacted as Regulation XXII of 1793. Each district was cut into thanas, or police circles. Note the phrase the paper uses: '20 – 30 miles square' means a square of side twenty to thirty miles, not an area of twenty to thirty square miles. A thana of twenty miles square is 400 square miles, and 400 square miles is precisely the figure the standard accounts give for the size of a Cornwallis thana. The statement is consistent with the received figure and not, as a hurried reader might think, a hundredfold error. Statement 2 is correct. Each thana was placed under a government officer called the daroga — a Persian term, like thana and thanedar themselves, that had entered Indian administrative usage under earlier rule and was simply taken over. The daroga's authority ran over the village watchmen who did the actual policing of the villages, and the office survives in the Indian police hierarchy as the officer in charge of a police station. Statement 4 is correct. The daroga was appointed by the magistrate of the district and placed under his supervision; he could not be removed without the approval of government. That is the structural point of the reform. Cornwallis had taken police powers away from the zamindars, and putting the daroga in the magistrate's gift is how the new police was tied to the Company's own district officer rather than to the landholder. Statement 3 is the false one, and it is false by a date rather than by a fact. The daroga system was extended to Madras in 1802, not 1812. What happened around 1812 is the reverse: the system was given up in Madras, and Madras Regulation XI of 1816 handed policing back to the village establishment under the collector, in line with Thomas Munro's objection that the daroga system 'was not founded in the usages of the country'. A committee appointed by Bentinck in 1805 had already reported that a thanadari police would put the government to enormous expense. So the year in statement 3 is the year the experiment ended in Madras, offered as the year it began. That leaves 1, 2 and 4, which is option (d).

• (a)1 and 2 only — This is the trap that catches careful candidates rather than careless ones, because everything in it is true. Statements 1 and 2 are both correct. The failure is one of omission: statement 4 is correct as well, and the stem asks which statements are correct, so nothing short of the complete set of true statements can be the answer. Whenever an option carries 'only', check the statements it leaves out before marking it — an option that is true but incomplete is wrong in exactly the same way as one that is false.
• (b)2, 3 and 4 — Wrong twice over. It includes statement 3, whose date is the error the question is built on — the daroga system reached Madras in 1802 and was abandoned there around 1812, so 1812 is the year of its withdrawal and not of its introduction. And it drops statement 1, which is correct: the districts were divided into thanas of twenty to thirty miles square. Any option containing 3 can be eliminated the moment the Madras date is known, which reduces this question to a choice between (a) and (d).
• (c)1, 3 and 4 — Also wrong twice over, and in the mirror image of option (b). It carries statement 3, which is false on its date, and it drops statement 2, which is as plainly correct as any statement in the set — the officer placed over each thana was the daroga, and the whole question is built around that office. An option that both admits a false statement and excludes a true one cannot survive either test.

Before 1792 the Company left rural policing where the Mughal system had left it, with the zamindars, who kept their own retainers and were answerable for crime in their lands. Cornwallis's reform, part of the same settlement of 1793 that made the zamindars proprietors of the soil, took that duty away from them: landholders would pay their revenue punctually and be treated as owners, and policing would pass to a newly organised government establishment. Each district was divided into thanas of about 400 square miles, each under a daroga appointed by and answerable to the district magistrate, with village watchmen below him; darogas could not be removed without government sanction, and were encouraged by rewards — a commission of ten per cent on the value of recovered stolen property, and ten rupees for arresting a dacoit. This is the thanadari system, and it is where the hierarchy of the modern Indian police begins. It was designed less to protect the villager than to strengthen the magistrate's arm for revenue collection and control of territory, and its reputation was poor: the darogas were widely accused of extortion, and the Court of Directors eventually condemned the establishment of darogas and their subordinates and pressed for a return to the village police. The system was extended to Madras in 1802 and abandoned there within about a decade; the wider settlement had to wait for the Police Commission of 1860 and the Police Act of 1861.

This is a multiple-statement item, and the paper's Part B uses the form for exactly this purpose: to make a candidate rule on four separate assertions rather than recognise one fact. Three of the four here are textbook description and only one carries a checkable number, so the question is really 'do you know when the daroga system reached Madras?' dressed in a code. The habit rewarded is to mark each statement true or false independently before looking at the options at all, and then to take the option that matches the whole verdict — which is what defeats the true-but-incomplete option (a).

• Cornwallis imposed police regulations on the Bengal collectorate areas on 7 December 1792, re-enacted as Regulation XXII of 1793, ending policing through the zamindars.
• Districts were divided into thanas or police circles of twenty to thirty miles square — a thana of twenty miles square being 400 square miles, the figure standard accounts give.
• Each thana was placed under a government officer styled daroga, with the village watchmen under his authority; this is the thanadari system.
• The daroga was appointed by the district magistrate and worked under his supervision, and could not be removed without the approval of government.
• Darogas were rewarded with a ten per cent commission on the value of recovered stolen property and ten rupees for arresting a dacoit.
• The daroga system was extended to Madras in 1802 and given up there about a decade later; Madras Regulation XI of 1816 restored policing through the village establishment under the collector.
• A police committee appointed by Bentinck in 1805 had reported that a thanadari police would put the government to enormous expenditure — one reason Madras turned back to the village police.
• The Court of Directors condemned the daroga establishments and insisted on the maintenance of the village police as the best security of internal peace.

• Reading '20 – 30 miles square' as twenty to thirty square miles. A thana of twenty miles square is 400 square miles.
• Marking option (a) because both the statements in it are true. The stem asks for the correct statements, so a true but incomplete set is still the wrong answer.
• Attaching the daroga to the zamindar. The reform's whole point was to move policing from the zamindar to a government officer under the magistrate.
• Confusing 1812 with 1802. The daroga system went to Madras in 1802; the years around 1812 to 1816 are when it was undone there.

Company-period administration comes to EO/AO as statement sets built on the Cornwallis, Wellesley, Bentinck and Dalhousie reforms, with one date planted among several safe descriptive claims. Prepare the police reforms as a timeline — 1792 Bengal, 1802 Madras, the retreat of 1812–1816, the Commission of 1860, the Act of 1861 — and the planted date shows up on sight.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under the police arrangements introduced by Cornwallis, the officer placed in charge of a thana was known as the :

  • (a)Kotwal
  • (b)Daroga
  • (c)Tahsildar
  • (d)Faujdar

  Answer(b) Daroga

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following Acts placed the Indian police on its modern statutory footing following the Police Commission of 1860 ?

  • (a)The Charter Act, 1833
  • (b)The Indian Councils Act, 1861
  • (c)The Police Act, 1861
  • (d)The Criminal Procedure Code, 1861

  Answer(c) The Police Act, 1861