MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 74 of 100

Correct — option (1). The Committee of Parliament on Official Language is a statutory body, and its mandate is not a matter of general impression but of the words of the statute that created it. Section 4 of the Official Languages Act, 1963 provides for its constitution after the expiry of ten years from the commencement of Section 3 of that Act, on a resolution moved in either House with the previous sanction of the President and passed by both Houses; the Committee was accordingly constituted in 1976. It consists of thirty members, twenty of them members of the House of the People and ten members of the Council of States, elected by their respective Houses by proportional representation through the single transferable vote, and it has by convention been chaired by the Union Home Minister. The duty laid on it by Section 4 is stated in a single sentence: it shall be the duty of the Committee to review the progress made in the use of Hindi for the official purposes of the Union and to submit a report to the President making recommendations thereon, whereupon the President causes the report to be laid before each House of Parliament and sent to all the State Governments. Statement A is that duty, put in the Committee's own statutory words, and it is correct. The other three statements each describe real work that is genuinely done somewhere in the Indian system, but none of it is done by this Committee. Statement B — examining linguistic demands for new States — belongs to the machinery of States reorganisation, the Dhar Commission, the JVP Committee and above all the States Reorganisation Commission of 1953, whose report led to the reorganisation of 1956; it has nothing to do with the promotion of Hindi in Union offices. Statement C — identifying endangered languages and recommending measures to protect them — is the work of the scheme for the protection and preservation of endangered languages run through the Central Institute of Indian Languages at Mysuru under the education ministry, a conservation function quite distinct from monitoring the official language of the Union. Statement D — examining vernacular education and recommending the effective implementation of the three-language formula — is a matter of education policy, the formula having come out of the national education policy framework rather than out of the Official Languages Act, and it lies with the education authorities and not with this Committee. Only statement A survives, so the answer is option (1).

• (2)B, C and D — This option selects the three statements that are in fact outside the Committee's mandate and drops the one that is its statutory duty, so it is the exact inverse of the answer. Each of the three describes real activity — reorganisation of States on linguistic lines, the conservation of endangered languages, and the three-language formula in school education — and each belongs to a different institution. The reason this option is attractive is that all three sound like language work, and a candidate who reasons from the Committee's name rather than from its statute will suppose that a parliamentary committee on official language must supervise language policy at large. It does not: its remit is narrow and specific, confined to reviewing how far Hindi is actually being used for the official purposes of the Union and reporting to the President on it.
• (3)A and D — This option pairs the correct statement A with statement D, which is not part of the Committee's function. The three-language formula concerns what languages are taught in schools and belongs to education policy and to the education ministry, whereas the Committee constituted under Section 4 of the Official Languages Act is concerned with the language of government business — the extent to which Hindi is used in the offices, correspondence and records of the Union. The two subjects are easily conflated because both involve Hindi and both touch on the balance between Hindi and other languages, but they are governed by different instruments and administered by different authorities. This is the classic near-miss option: right about the item everyone can identify, wrong about the one that requires the statute to be known.
• (4)All of the above — 'All of the above' requires every statement to describe an objective of the Committee, and three of them do not. The Committee's duty under Section 4 is stated in the Act in a single limb — to review the progress made in the use of Hindi for the official purposes of the Union and to report to the President with recommendations — and a body created by statute has only the functions its statute confers. Escape options of this kind are offered ten times across this paper, and being offered is not evidence of being keyed. The useful discipline for statutory bodies in particular is to ask what the creating provision actually says rather than what the body's name suggests, because examiners construct wrong options for such questions precisely by listing plausible activities in the same field and relying on the candidate to reason from the title instead of from the text.

The Constitution deals with the official language in Part XVII. Article 343 makes Hindi in the Devanagari script the official language of the Union, with English continuing for fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution and Parliament empowered to provide for its continued use thereafter — which it did through the Official Languages Act, 1963. Article 344 creates two distinct bodies whose similar names cause constant confusion. Article 344(1) provides for an Official Language Commission appointed by the President to make recommendations on the progressive use of Hindi and restrictions on the use of English; the first such Commission was constituted in 1955 under the chairmanship of B. G. Kher. Article 344(4) then provides for a Committee of Parliament of thirty members, twenty from the House of the People and ten from the Council of States, to examine the recommendations of that Commission and report its opinion to the President. Separately, Section 4 of the Official Languages Act, 1963 creates the standing Committee of Parliament on Official Language — again thirty members in the same twenty-and-ten proportion — whose duty is to review the progress made in the use of Hindi for the official purposes of the Union and to report to the President, who lays the report before both Houses and sends it to all the State Governments and may then issue directions in accordance with it. This is the body the question is about, and it was constituted in 1976. Around these sit other language provisions worth holding together: Article 345 allows a State to adopt one or more languages in use in the State as its official language, Article 350A directs States to provide instruction in the mother tongue at the primary stage to children of linguistic minorities, Article 350B provides for a Special Officer for Linguistic Minorities appointed by the President, and the Eighth Schedule lists the languages recognised by the Constitution.

Questions on institutions are the Commission's most efficient way of testing whether a candidate has read the enabling provision or only recognised the name, and the option set here is built entirely on that difference. Three of the four statements describe activities that a body called a Committee of Parliament on Official Language might plausibly undertake — arbitrating linguistic claims for new States, protecting dying languages, supervising language teaching in schools — and every one of them is real work carried out by some other institution. Only the statement that reproduces the statutory duty is correct. The habit this rewards is to attach to every body a one-line note of its creating instrument and its mandate in that instrument's own words, because for statutory and constitutional bodies alike the mandate is a closed list and anything outside it is a false statement however reasonable it sounds. A second point specific to this topic is the tangle of similarly named bodies: the Official Language Commission under Article 344(1), the Committee of Parliament under Article 344(4) which examines that Commission's recommendations, and the standing Committee under Section 4 of the 1963 Act, two of which have thirty members in the same twenty-and-ten split. Sorting those three out is worth more than any single fact about any one of them. Note that this question labels its statements A to D in the English column and अ to ड in the Marathi, and that the English stem prints 'Official language' with a lower-case second word and omits the article before 'Committee of Parliament', both reproduced as printed.

• The Committee of Parliament on Official Language is constituted under Section 4 of the Official Languages Act, 1963; it was set up in 1976, after the expiry of ten years from the commencement of Section 3 of that Act.
• Its statutory duty is to review the progress made in the use of Hindi for the official purposes of the Union and to submit a report to the President making recommendations, which the President lays before each House of Parliament and sends to all the State Governments.
• The Committee consists of thirty members — twenty from the House of the People and ten from the Council of States — elected by their respective Houses by proportional representation through the single transferable vote, and it has by convention been chaired by the Union Home Minister.
• Article 344(1) provides separately for an Official Language Commission appointed by the President, the first of which was constituted in 1955 under the chairmanship of B. G. Kher, and Article 344(4) provides for a Committee of Parliament of thirty members to examine that Commission's recommendations.
• Article 343 makes Hindi in the Devanagari script the official language of the Union with English continuing for fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution, and the Official Languages Act, 1963 provides for the continued use of English thereafter.

• Inferring a body's mandate from its name, when a statutory body has only the functions its creating provision confers and everything else, however plausible, lies outside it
• Confusing the Official Language Commission under Article 344(1), the Committee of Parliament under Article 344(4) and the standing Committee under Section 4 of the 1963 Act, two of which have thirty members in the same twenty-and-ten split
• Attributing school language policy, including the three-language formula, to the Official Languages Act, when it belongs to education policy and to a different ministry
• Assuming a committee concerned with official language must also handle the protection of endangered languages, which is a conservation function run through the Central Institute of Indian Languages
• Selecting 'All of the above' on an institution question without checking each function against the enabling provision

Institutional questions are a fixed component of MPSC's polity section, and they come in a small number of shapes: which provision created a body, what its composition is, what its mandate is, and whether it is constitutional, statutory or executive in character. The Commission's method of building wrong options for a mandate question is consistent and worth recognising — it lists activities from the same policy field that other institutions carry out, so that every option sounds appropriate to the body's name and only the statute separates them. The bodies that recur are those whose remit is commonly misremembered, and the language institutions are favourites because there are several of them with overlapping names. Preparation should therefore record for each body four things: the Article or section that creates it, whether it is constitutional or statutory, its composition, and its mandate in the words of the instrument. That note answers every variant, including the very common question of whether a named body is constitutional or not.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Committee of Parliament on Official Language constituted under the Official Languages Act, 1963 consists of how many members ?

  • (a)Twenty members, all from the House of the People
  • (b)Thirty members, twenty from the House of the People and ten from the Council of States
  • (c)Thirty members, fifteen from each House
  • (d)Forty members, thirty from the House of the People and ten from the Council of States

  Answer(b) Thirty members, twenty from the House of the People and ten from the Council of States — they are elected by their respective Houses by proportional representation through the single transferable vote. The same thirty-member composition in the same twenty-and-ten proportion is prescribed for the Committee of Parliament provided for under Article 344(4), which examines the recommendations of the Official Language Commission, and the two bodies are frequently confused with each other.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under which Article of the Constitution is Hindi in the Devanagari script declared to be the official language of the Union ?

  • (a)Article 343
  • (b)Article 344
  • (c)Article 345
  • (d)Article 351

  Answer(a) Article 343 — it declares Hindi in the Devanagari script to be the official language of the Union and provided for English to continue for fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution, Parliament being empowered to extend that use, which it did through the Official Languages Act, 1963. Article 344 provides for the Official Language Commission and the Committee of Parliament, Article 345 allows a State to adopt its own official language, and Article 351 directs the Union to promote the spread of Hindi.