Consider the following statements regarding ‘Zero Hour’ of Lok Sabha : A. The time immediately following the question hour and laying of papers and before any listed business is taken up in the house has come to be known as the zero hour. B. For raising matters during the zero hour members has to give notice between 8.00 a.m. to 9.30 a.m. everyday to the Speaker. C. At present, thirty matters per day as per their priority are allowed to be raised during zero hour. D. There is no maximum limit on the number of matters that can be raised on any given day as there is no provision in rules about Zero Hour. Which of the statements given above are correct ?
- (1)A and B
- (2)A, B and D
- (3)B, C and D
- (4)A and D
Correct — option (4), which nominates statements A and D. All four statements in this question are drawn from the Lok Sabha's own description of the Zero Hour, and the examiner has reproduced two of them faithfully while altering a number in each of the other two. Statement A is the Lok Sabha's definition almost word for word: the time immediately following the Question Hour and the laying of papers, and before any listed business is taken up in the House, has come to be popularly known as the Zero Hour. The name follows from the clock rather than from any rule — the Question Hour occupies the first hour of the sitting from eleven, so the period that follows begins at about twelve noon, the 'zeroth' hour of the day's business. Statement A is therefore correct. Statement D is correct too, and it states the single most important fact about this device: the Zero Hour finds no mention whatever in the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in Lok Sabha. It is a convention that grew up in the early nineteen-sixties, an Indian innovation with no British parallel, by which members raise matters of urgent public importance without the prior notice that every formal parliamentary device demands. Because the Rules are silent, no rule prescribes a ceiling on how many matters may be raised on a given day; what is taken up rests on the Speaker's discretion and on the time available. Statements B and C, by contrast, both carry a corrupted number. The notice for raising a matter in the Zero Hour is given to the Speaker between 8.30 a.m. and 9.00 a.m. on the day, a window of thirty minutes, and not between 8.00 a.m. and 9.30 a.m. as statement B has it. And the figure associated with the practice is twenty matters a day, taken in the order of a ballot, not the thirty of statement C. Resist the tempting shortcut here: statements C and D do NOT contradict each other. C is a claim about PRACTICE (how many matters are actually taken up in a day) and D is a claim about the RULES (that no rule caps the number). Both can hold at once, and both do — twenty a day by ballot, under no rule whatever, because the Rules of Procedure do not mention the Zero Hour at all. C fails on its NUMBER, not on any conflict with D. Since A is unquestionably correct, only option (4) can be the answer.
- (1)A and B — 'A and B' accepts the definition, which is right, and then accepts the notice timing, which is wrong. Statement B misstates the window: notice for a Zero Hour matter is given to the Speaker between 8.30 a.m. and 9.00 a.m. on the day the member wishes to raise it, a half-hour window that closes well before the House meets at eleven. Statement B stretches it at both ends, to 8.00 a.m. and 9.30 a.m., which is the examiner's alteration. This option also fails for a second reason worth seeing: it excludes statement D, which is the fact the whole question is built around, namely that the Zero Hour has no basis in the Rules of Procedure at all. A combination that leaves out the no-provision-in-the-rules statement is unlikely to be the intended answer in a question about the Zero Hour. Note in passing that statement B is also printed with broken grammar, 'members has to give notice', which is a printing defect and not a clue to its truth.
- (2)A, B and D — 'A, B and D' gets two of its three components right and is spoiled by the same defective statement that spoils option (1). Statements A and D are both correct, and a candidate who has reasoned as far as recognising them has done the hard part of the question. Statement B then has to be tested on its own, and it fails on the timing: the notice window is 8.30 a.m. to 9.00 a.m., not 8.00 a.m. to 9.30 a.m. This is the most expensive kind of error in a statement question, because the candidate is one item away from the answer and loses the whole mark to a half-remembered clock time. The defence is to treat any statement carrying a precise number — a time, a count, a date, a percentage — as the place the examiner is most likely to have tampered with, and to refuse to admit such a statement unless the number itself can be recalled rather than merely the shape of the sentence around it.
- (3)B, C and D — 'B, C and D' is the only option that excludes statement A, the definition, which is the most securely correct statement in the set — that alone is enough to strike it out. It then compounds the error by admitting both statement B, whose notice window is wrong, and statement C, whose number is wrong. Statement C deserves a closer look because it is the trap for a well-read candidate: there is a real figure in the practice of the House, and matters are indeed taken up in the order of a ballot, but the figure is twenty a day and not thirty. Note that C and D are NOT in conflict, tempting though that reading is: a settled daily practice and the absence of any RULE imposing a ceiling sit together perfectly well, which is exactly the Zero Hour's position — twenty matters a day by ballot, under no rule at all. So this option cannot be eliminated by spotting a contradiction; it has to be eliminated on C's number, which is twenty and not thirty.
The Zero Hour is the best-known example of a parliamentary practice that exists entirely outside the written rules. The Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in Lok Sabha provide formal devices for raising matters — the Question Hour, the calling-attention motion, the half-an-hour discussion, the short-duration discussion, the adjournment motion — and every one of them requires notice and admission in a prescribed form. The Zero Hour began in the early nineteen-sixties when members took to raising urgent matters immediately after the Question Hour without any such notice, and the practice hardened into a convention that the Chair now regulates although no rule mentions it. In its present working a member sends the Speaker a written notice on the morning of the sitting, between 8.30 a.m. and 9.00 a.m., stating the subject; the admitted notices are balloted, and twenty matters a day are taken up in the order of that ballot, the Chair retaining the discretion to allow or refuse any of them. The device's virtue is immediacy — a matter that broke overnight can be raised the same morning — and its weakness is the same immediacy, since a minister has had no notice and can rarely reply substantively. Rajya Sabha follows a parallel practice under its own Chairman, alongside the Special Mentions procedure.
Parliamentary procedure is a standing favourite of MPSC's polity section, and questions on it are set in a characteristic way: a block of statements lifted almost verbatim from an official description of the House's working, with one or two numbers quietly altered. This question is a textbook instance — every one of the four statements traces to the Lok Sabha's own account of the Zero Hour, and the two false statements differ from it only in a clock time and a count. That tells the candidate exactly where to look. Two habits pay here. The first is to treat numbers as the suspect element in any statement that otherwise reads like an official text; a sentence you half-recognise is not thereby a sentence you have verified. The second is to check the statements against one another before checking them against memory: statements C and D of this question are mutually exclusive, so the answer must contain one and not both, which eliminates two of the four options at a stroke and does so without any recall at all. It is worth adding that the printed English here is defective in two places — statement B reads 'members has to give notice ... everyday', and the paper writes 'zero hour' in lower case in three statements and 'Zero Hour' capitalised in the stem and in statement D. Neither carries any meaning; the case and the grammar are printing artefacts, not signals.
- The Zero Hour is the period immediately following the Question Hour and the laying of papers, before any listed business is taken up; it begins around twelve noon, which is where its name comes from.
- The Zero Hour finds no mention in the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in Lok Sabha; it is a convention that grew up in the early nineteen-sixties, an Indian innovation with no British parallel.
- A member wishing to raise a matter during the Zero Hour gives written notice to the Speaker between 8.30 a.m. and 9.00 a.m. on the day of the sitting, stating the subject to be raised.
- Twenty matters a day are at present allowed to be raised during the Zero Hour, taken up in the order of a ballot, with the Speaker retaining discretion over whether a matter is allowed at all.
- Because no rule governs the Zero Hour, the formal devices of the House that do have rules — the calling-attention motion, the half-an-hour discussion, the short-duration discussion and the adjournment motion — all require prior notice and admission in a prescribed form, which the Zero Hour does not.
The Zero Hour is a convention of the early 1960s, an Indian innovation with no British parallel, by which a member raises an urgent matter without the prior notice every rule-based device demands — the calling-attention motion, the half-an-hour discussion, the short-duration discussion and the adjournment motion all require notice in a prescribed form. Note that C and D are often misread as contradicting each other. They do not: one describes practice, the other describes the Rules, and the Zero Hour is precisely the case where a settled practice runs under no rule at all.
- Admitting a statement because it reads like an official sentence, when the examiner has altered only the number inside it
- Treating a statement about PRACTICE and a statement about the RULES as though they contradicted each other — a settled daily convention and the absence of any rule imposing it are compatible, and on the Zero Hour both are true at once
- Confusing the Zero Hour notice window of 8.30 a.m. to 9.00 a.m. with the timing of other procedures, or assuming that a device without a rule must also be without a practice
- Believing that because the Zero Hour is not in the Rules of Procedure, the Chair exercises no control over it — the Speaker decides what is admitted and in what order
Parliamentary procedure reaches MPSC in two forms. The simpler form asks a single fact — what the Zero Hour is, when it begins, or whether it appears in the Rules — and can be answered from one line of preparation. The harder form, used here, sets four statements drawn from an official description and corrupts one or two of them, so that the candidate must verify each separately before choosing a combination. Numbers are the examiner's favourite target because they are easy to alter and hard to dispute: the notice window, the count of matters admitted, the duration of the Question Hour, the number of days' notice a motion requires. The same block of the syllabus supplies related items on the calling-attention motion, the adjournment motion, the no-confidence motion and the various kinds of questions, and preparing all of them as a single table of device against notice requirement against who admits it covers the whole family efficiently.
No directly related past PYQ was found.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Which of the following statements about the Zero Hour in the Lok Sabha is correct ?
- (a)It is provided for in the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in Lok Sabha
- (b)It is a convention with no mention in the Rules of Procedure
- (c)It is provided for in Article 118 of the Constitution
- (d)It is governed by a direction issued under the Government of India Act, 1935
Answer(b) It is a convention with no mention in the Rules of Procedure — the Zero Hour is an Indian innovation of the early nineteen-sixties that grew out of members raising urgent matters immediately after the Question Hour without prior notice, and the Rules are silent on it. Article 118, named in the third option, is the provision under which each House may make rules regulating its procedure, but it does not itself create the Zero Hour.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Zero Hour in the Lok Sabha begins at which point of the day's proceedings ?
- (a)Immediately after the House assembles, before the Question Hour
- (b)Immediately after the Question Hour and the laying of papers, before listed business
- (c)After the day's listed business has been disposed of
- (d)At the commencement of the post-lunch sitting
Answer(b) Immediately after the Question Hour and the laying of papers, before listed business — the House meets at eleven, the Question Hour occupies the first hour, and the period that follows begins at about twelve noon, which is why the practice acquired the name Zero Hour. Nothing in the Rules of Procedure fixes this period; it exists as a convention regulated by the Speaker.