MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 84 of 100

Correct — option (3), which nominates statements A, B and D. The question is really a Seventh Schedule question: each statement assigns a subject to one of the three Lists, and only one assignment is wrong. Statement A is correct. Entry 6 of the Concurrent List reads 'Transfer of property other than agricultural land; registration of deeds and documents', so the transfer of non-agricultural property is indeed a Concurrent subject — which is why the Transfer of Property Act and the Registration Act are central laws that States may and do amend. Agricultural land is deliberately carved out, because land and rights in land are a State subject under Entry 18 of the State List. Statement B is correct. Entry 86 of the Union List reads 'Taxes on the capital value of the assets, exclusive of agricultural land, of individuals and companies; taxes on the capital of companies', and that is the head under which the Wealth-tax Act, 1957 was enacted; here too agricultural land is excluded, and the exclusion is the same one that appears in statement A. Statement D is correct. Entry 12 of the State List reads 'Libraries, museums and other similar institutions controlled or financed by the State; ancient and historical monuments and records other than those declared by or under law made by Parliament to be of national importance', so a museum of antiquities run or funded by a State belongs to the State List. That leaves statement C, and it is the one that fails. Entertainment tax is not a Concurrent subject and never was. Before the Goods and Services Tax it sat in Entry 62 of the State List, which then read 'Taxes on luxuries, including taxes on entertainments, amusements, betting and gambling'; after the Constitution (One Hundred and First Amendment) Act, 2016 that entry was recast to read 'Taxes on entertainments and amusements to the extent levied and collected by a Panchayat or a Municipality or a Regional Council or a District Council'. The entry moved and narrowed, but it stayed in List II throughout. Entertainments as a subject of regulation likewise sit in the State List, at Entry 33. Since A, B and D stand and C does not, option (3) is the answer.

• (1)A, B and C — 'A, B and C' is right about the two subjects that carry the agricultural-land exclusion and wrong about the third. Statements A and B are both correct, and a candidate who has verified them has done most of the work. Statement C then has to be tested on its own, and entertainment tax has never been a Concurrent List subject. Its home before the Goods and Services Tax was Entry 62 of the State List, covering taxes on luxuries including entertainments, amusements, betting and gambling, and the 101st Amendment left it in the State List while narrowing it to entertainment and amusement taxes levied and collected by local bodies. The reason a candidate reaches for the Concurrent List here is that entertainment feels like a shared modern subject and the Concurrent List is where shared subjects go. Taxation does not work that way: the Constitution keeps taxing powers separate rather than concurrent, and there is almost nothing in the Concurrent List that is a tax at all.
• (2)B, C and D — 'B, C and D' makes two errors at once — it excludes a true statement and admits the false one. Statement A is correct, since Entry 6 of the Concurrent List expressly covers the transfer of property other than agricultural land along with the registration of deeds and documents, so no correct combination can leave it out. And statement C is the defective item, because entertainment tax belongs to the State List and not the Concurrent List. The structural clue that this option ignores is the parallel between statements A and B: both are framed as 'property other than agricultural land', both reproduce a real constitutional entry, and both are therefore likely to be genuine. Where two statements in a set share a formula lifted from the text of a document, they usually stand or fall together, and an option that admits one while rejecting the other should be looked at with suspicion.
• (4)A, C and D — 'A, C and D' drops the wealth tax statement and keeps the entertainment tax statement, which is precisely the wrong way round. Statement B is correct: Entry 86 of the Union List covers taxes on the capital value of the assets, exclusive of agricultural land, of individuals and companies, and that entry is the constitutional foundation of the Wealth-tax Act, 1957. It remains in the Union List even though the wealth tax itself was abolished in 2015, since abolishing a tax does not delete the legislative head under which it was levied — a distinction the Commission is fond of. Meanwhile statement C, which this option admits, misplaces entertainment tax in the Concurrent List when it has always been in the State List. A candidate who rejects statement B does so usually because the paper's word is 'wealth tax' while the entry speaks of 'taxes on the capital value of the assets'; the two are the same thing, the second being the constitutional description of the first.

The Seventh Schedule divides legislative subjects into three Lists — the Union List, the State List and the Concurrent List, which the Constitution as adopted carried with ninety-seven, sixty-six and forty-seven entries respectively — figures later amendments have changed, so that the State List now stands at sixty-one in force and the Concurrent List at fifty-two — and Article 246 tells you what each List means: Parliament has exclusive power over List I, State Legislatures over List II, and both over List III, with a central law prevailing over a repugnant State law under Article 254 unless the State law has received the President's assent. Two structural facts about the Schedule answer most questions built on it. The first is that taxation heads are kept separate from regulatory heads and are almost never concurrent: the power to regulate a subject and the power to tax it are listed distinctly, which is why entertainment appears as a regulatory head at State List Entry 33 and as a taxing head at State List Entry 62. The second is the recurring carve-out of agricultural land, which runs through the Schedule — the transfer of property, wealth tax, estate duty and succession duty are all framed as applying to 'property other than agricultural land', because land is reserved to the States. The 101st Amendment of 2016 rewrote parts of the Schedule to make room for the Goods and Services Tax, subsuming several State taxes including entertainment tax except where a local body levies it, and this is why the same subject can be described differently in an older textbook and in the current text.

MPSC examines centre-State relations mainly through the Seventh Schedule, and mainly in this format: four subjects, each assigned to a List, with one assignment corrupted. The corruption is usually made in the direction a candidate will find plausible, and the Concurrent List is the favourite destination for a subject that actually belongs to the States, because 'concurrent' sounds like a reasonable home for anything modern or shared. The corrective is to learn the Lists by their organising logic rather than by rote: defence, foreign affairs, currency, banking, inter-State trade and the major taxes to the Union; police, public health, agriculture, land, local government and State taxes to the States; and the Concurrent List as the meeting ground of criminal law, civil procedure, marriage and divorce, contracts, education, forests and electricity. Once the logic is in place the exceptions are few enough to memorise. This question also carries a printing divergence between the paper's two columns: the Marathi statement corresponding to statement B reads simply 'tax on property' where the English says 'wealth tax on property'. Each column has been transcribed as printed and neither has been reconciled to the other, so a Marathi-medium candidate was reading a slightly broader statement than an English-medium one — a fact worth knowing when comparing answers with a friend who wrote the other column.

• Entry 6 of the Concurrent List covers 'Transfer of property other than agricultural land; registration of deeds and documents', which is why the Transfer of Property Act and the Registration Act are central laws that States may amend.
• Entry 86 of the Union List covers 'Taxes on the capital value of the assets, exclusive of agricultural land, of individuals and companies; taxes on the capital of companies', and it is the head under which the Wealth-tax Act, 1957 was enacted.
• Entertainment tax has always been a State List subject: before the Goods and Services Tax it fell within Entry 62 covering taxes on luxuries, entertainments, amusements, betting and gambling, and the 101st Amendment narrowed that entry to entertainment and amusement taxes levied and collected by local bodies.
• Entry 12 of the State List covers libraries, museums and similar institutions controlled or financed by the State, together with ancient and historical monuments and records other than those declared by Parliament to be of national importance.
• Named national institutions are treated differently: Entry 62 of the Union List covers the National Library, the Indian Museum, the Imperial War Museum, the Victoria Memorial and the Indian War Memorial, and any like institution financed by the Government of India and declared by Parliament to be of national importance.

• Assigning a subject to the Concurrent List because it sounds shared or modern, when the Constitution keeps almost no taxing head concurrent
• Failing to recognise 'wealth tax' in the constitutional formula 'taxes on the capital value of the assets', and rejecting a true statement because the wording is unfamiliar
• Assuming that abolishing a tax removes the legislative entry under which it was levied — wealth tax was abolished in 2015 but Union List Entry 86 remains
• Overlooking that entertainment tax stayed in the State List after the 101st Amendment even though its entry was rewritten and narrowed to levies by local bodies

Seventh Schedule questions appear in MPSC papers in three shapes: match a subject to its List, identify the odd assignment in a set of four, or state which List a named entry belongs to. The second shape, used here, is the most common because it lets the examiner test four facts in one question while providing internal structure that a prepared candidate can exploit. The subjects that recur are the ones where intuition and the text disagree — education and forests, which moved from the State List to the Concurrent List by the 42nd Amendment; police and public order, which stay with the States; and the taxing heads, which candidates routinely misplace. Expect at least one question in every paper to turn on a subject moved by an amendment, and expect the Goods and Services Tax rearrangement of 2016 to be the source of several, since it changed entries that older preparation material still describes in their pre-2016 form.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution, the subject 'transfer of property other than agricultural land' belongs to which List ?

  • (a)The Union List
  • (b)The State List
  • (c)The Concurrent List
  • (d)It is a residuary subject and belongs to no List

  Answer(c) The Concurrent List — Entry 6 of List III reads 'Transfer of property other than agricultural land; registration of deeds and documents', which is why both Parliament and the State Legislatures can legislate on it and why several States have their own amendments to the Transfer of Property Act. Agricultural land is excluded because land and rights in land are reserved to the States under Entry 18 of the State List.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Museums controlled or financed by a State Government fall under which entry of the Seventh Schedule ?

  • (a)Entry 12 of the State List
  • (b)Entry 62 of the Union List
  • (c)Entry 40 of the Concurrent List
  • (d)Entry 67 of the Union List

  Answer(a) Entry 12 of the State List, which covers libraries, museums and other similar institutions controlled or financed by the State along with ancient monuments and records not declared of national importance. Entry 62 of the Union List is different: it names the National Library, the Indian Museum, the Imperial War Museum, the Victoria Memorial and the Indian War Memorial, and any like institution financed by the Government of India and declared by Parliament to be of national importance.