MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 77 of 100

Correct — option (2). The stem is a heading rather than a question — 'Key Provisions of Lokpal and Lokayukta (Amendment) Act, 2016 :' — and the actual question follows the statement list, asking which of the statements given above are correct. Everything therefore turns on distinguishing what the 2016 amending Act did from what the principal Act of 2013 had already done, and that is the single distinction the item is built on. Statement A is correct. The amending Act of 2016 amended the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013, and the parenthetical date is right: the principal Act received assent on 1 January 2014 and came into force on 16 January 2014. Statement B is correct. The provision the 2016 Act reached into was Section 44 of the principal Act, which is the section dealing with the furnishing of details of assets and liabilities by public servants. Statement D is correct, and it describes what that amendment actually accomplished. Section 44 as originally enacted required a public servant to furnish, within thirty days of entering office, details of the assets and liabilities of which he and his spouse and his dependent children were owners or beneficiaries, and to file a further declaration annually by 31 July, with publication by the competent authority thereafter. The 2016 Act swept that machinery away and substituted a single requirement that a public servant shall declare his assets and liabilities in such form and manner as may be prescribed by the Central Government — so the thirty-day period was removed and the form and manner left to be settled by rules. The Bill was introduced and passed in the Lok Sabha on 27 July 2016, passed by the Rajya Sabha on 28 July 2016 and assented to on 29 July 2016. Statement C is the one that fails, and it fails on attribution rather than on content. It is perfectly true that every State is required to establish the office of Lokayukta within one year, but that requirement is Section 63 of the principal Act of 2013 and was not created by the amending Act of 2016, which confined itself to the asset-declaration provisions. A statement that describes a genuine provision and assigns it to the wrong statute is a false statement, and recognising the provision is therefore not enough — the candidate must also know which instrument it belongs to. The correct statements are A, B and D, which is option (2), and it is the answer.

• (1)A, B and C — This option includes statement C, which attributes the one-year deadline for States to establish a Lokayukta to the 2016 amending Act when it belongs to Section 63 of the principal Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013. It also omits statement D, which describes the very thing the 2016 Act did — the removal of the thirty-day period for furnishing details of assets and liabilities. The option is attractive because statement C is a true proposition about the Lokayukta framework and a candidate who checks the content of a statement without checking its source will accept it. The general rule for amendment questions is that every statement must be tested twice: once for whether the provision exists, and once for whether it was created by the instrument named in the stem. The second test is the one the Commission relies on being skipped.
• (3)A, C and D — This option keeps statement A but drops statement B and admits statement C, so it is wrong in two directions at once. Dropping statement B is a substantial omission, because Section 44 is precisely the section the 2016 Act amended and is the whole subject matter of that amendment; an account of the 2016 Act that does not mention Section 44 has left out its content. Admitting statement C repeats the attribution error described above, the one-year requirement for States to set up a Lokayukta being Section 63 of the 2013 Act. The combination is what a candidate arrives at by remembering that the amendment concerned assets and that States are obliged to constitute Lokayuktas, without having fixed which provision sits in which Act — a partial recollection that this option is shaped to receive.
• (4)All of the above — 'All of the above' requires every statement to be correct, and statement C is not, because the obligation on States to establish a Lokayukta within one year was imposed by Section 63 of the principal Act of 2013 and not by the amending Act of 2016. The amending Act was a narrow instrument: it was introduced, passed by both Houses and assented to within three days at the end of July 2016, and it did one thing, replacing the detailed asset-declaration requirements of Section 44 with a provision leaving the form and manner of declaration to be prescribed by the Central Government. Escape options of this kind appear ten times across this paper and being offered is no evidence of being keyed. On an amendment question in particular, the escape option is rarely safe, because the whole purpose of such a question is to separate the amendment from the parent Act, and a list on which every statement is true would defeat that purpose.

The Lokpal is the national anti-corruption ombudsman and the Lokayukta its counterpart in the States, both recommended by the first Administrative Reforms Commission in 1966 and both long delayed at the Union level. The Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 received assent on 1 January 2014 and came into force on 16 January 2014. It establishes a Lokpal consisting of a Chairperson and up to eight Members, of whom not less than half must be judicial members, with a requirement that not less than half the Members come from among the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, other backward classes, minorities and women. The Chairperson and Members are appointed by the President on the recommendation of a Selection Committee comprising the Prime Minister as Chairperson, the Speaker of the House of the People, the Leader of the Opposition in that House, the Chief Justice of India or a judge nominated by him, and an eminent jurist. The Lokpal's jurisdiction extends to the Prime Minister subject to specified exclusions, to Ministers and Members of Parliament, and to officials of the Union government across all groups, along with certain office-bearers of societies and trusts receiving public or foreign funds. Section 63 of the same Act obliges every State to establish a Lokayukta by State law within one year of the commencement of the Act. Section 44 required public servants to declare their assets and liabilities, and it was that section alone that the Lokpal and Lokayuktas (Amendment) Act, 2016 altered, substituting a requirement that the declaration be made in such form and manner as the Central Government may prescribe for the earlier scheme of a thirty-day deadline, annual filing and publication. The first Lokpal chairperson, Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghose, was appointed in March 2019. In Maharashtra the institution long predates the central Act: the State established a Lokayukta and Upa-Lokayuktas in 1971, and Maharashtra is generally described as the first State to have set the institution up, though Odisha had passed a Lokayukta Act in 1970.

Amendment questions are a distinct family in MPSC polity papers and they are failed in a distinct way. The Commission does not usually invent a provision; it takes a real one from the parent Act and attributes it to the amending Act, so that every statement in the list is true as a proposition about the subject and only one of them is untrue as a proposition about the instrument named in the stem. Statement C here is a textbook instance: the one-year obligation on States to establish a Lokayukta is real, well known and frequently examined in its own right, and it belongs to Section 63 of the 2013 Act. A candidate who reads for content alone will pass it, and the mark is then lost. The technique that answers the whole family is to prepare an amendment as a short note of what it changed and nothing else — for the 2016 Act, that note is a single line about Section 44 and the removal of the thirty-day period — and to keep the parent Act's provisions in a separate note. A second habit worth forming on this topic is date discipline: assent, commencement and passage are three different dates, and this question turns partly on the fact that the 2013 Act was assented to on 1 January 2014 but commenced on 16 January 2014, the date printed in statement A. Note that the statements here are labelled A to D in the English column and अ to ड in the Marathi, and that the English column carries two printing oddities reproduced as printed — a capitalised 'Provision' in the middle of statement B and a subjectless statement C beginning 'Made it compulsory'.

• The Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 received assent on 1 January 2014 and came into force on 16 January 2014; the Lokpal and Lokayuktas (Amendment) Act, 2016 amended that Act and was passed by the Lok Sabha on 27 July 2016, by the Rajya Sabha on 28 July 2016 and assented to on 29 July 2016.
• The 2016 amendment altered Section 44 of the principal Act, the section requiring public servants to furnish details of their assets and liabilities, and it did not alter any other part of the Act.
• Section 44 as originally enacted required a declaration within thirty days of entering office covering the public servant, spouse and dependent children, with an annual filing thereafter; the 2016 amendment removed the thirty-day period and provided instead that the declaration be made in such form and manner as the Central Government may prescribe.
• The obligation on every State to establish a Lokayukta by State law within one year of the commencement of the Act is Section 63 of the principal Act of 2013, not a provision introduced by the 2016 amendment.
• The Lokpal consists of a Chairperson and up to eight Members, not less than half of them judicial, appointed by the President on the recommendation of a Selection Committee chaired by the Prime Minister; the first Chairperson, Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghose, was appointed in March 2019.

• Accepting a true provision that has been attributed to the wrong statute, which is the standard construction of an amendment question and the reason each statement must be tested for source as well as for content
• Confusing Section 44 of the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, on declarations of assets and liabilities, with Section 63, on the obligation of States to establish Lokayuktas
• Treating the date of assent as the date of commencement, when the 2013 Act was assented to on 1 January 2014 and commenced on 16 January 2014
• Assuming an amending Act made several changes when it made only one, since a narrow amendment passed in a few days is unlikely to have altered the structure of the parent Act
• Selecting 'All of the above' on an amendment question, when the purpose of such a question is precisely to separate what the amendment did from what the parent Act already provided

Anti-corruption institutions are examined in MPSC papers through composition questions, jurisdiction questions and amendment questions, and the last of these is the hardest because it demands that the candidate hold two instruments apart. The Commission's method is consistent: build a statement list in which the true statements describe the amendment accurately and the false one describes the parent Act accurately, so that all four read as correct statements about the subject. The topic also carries a state layer that MPSC exploits, since Maharashtra's Lokayukta long predates the central legislation and questions comparing the State institution with the central one are natural. Preparation should hold for the Lokpal the composition, the Selection Committee, the extent of jurisdiction and the one-year obligation on States, and separately a one-line note of what the 2016 amendment changed; the same discipline of a short 'what this amendment did' note applies to every amending Act in the syllabus.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The obligation on every State to establish the office of Lokayukta by State law within one year is contained in which of the following ?

  • (a)Section 44 of the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013
  • (b)Section 63 of the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013
  • (c)The Lokpal and Lokayuktas (Amendment) Act, 2016
  • (d)Article 323A of the Constitution

  Answer(b) Section 63 of the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 — the obligation was created by the principal Act and not by the amending Act of 2016, which confined itself to the asset-declaration provisions of Section 44. Article 323A concerns administrative tribunals and has nothing to do with the ombudsman, so it functions here as a reminder that a plausible-sounding constitutional reference is worth checking rather than accepting.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Selection Committee that recommends the appointment of the Chairperson and Members of the Lokpal is chaired by which of the following ?

  • (a)The President of India
  • (b)The Chief Justice of India
  • (c)The Prime Minister
  • (d)The Speaker of the Lok Sabha

  Answer(c) The Prime Minister — the Selection Committee under the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 consists of the Prime Minister as its Chairperson, the Speaker of the House of the People, the Leader of the Opposition in that House, the Chief Justice of India or a judge of the Supreme Court nominated by him, and an eminent jurist. The President makes the appointment on the Committee's recommendation but does not sit on the Committee.