MPSC 2025 Prelims Paper-I · Question 48 of 100

This question was cancelled by the Maharashtra Public Service Commission. The published final key marks no option as correct for it — that is why official_answer.correct is empty here — and MPSC does not disclose why a question is withdrawn or how, if at all, it was scored. Nothing in this card should be read as picking a winner among the four bundled options; the commission's own cancellation means there is no public record of which pairing it originally intended, and reconstructing one would only be a guess dressed up as an explanation. What is safe and useful to learn is the general subject the question is drawn from. A ceiling on agricultural holdings is a statutory cap, fixed by each state's own land-reforms Act, on how much agricultural land one person — or, in many Acts, a defined 'family unit' — may lawfully hold. Most Indian states first legislated ceilings in the 1950s and 1960s, but those early laws were widely criticised as toothless: limits were set high, land could be shown as split among relatives on paper without any real change in who controlled it, and long exemption lists — orchards, plantations, land held by religious or charitable trusts, and more — let large estates survive intact. The Union government issued national guidelines in 1972 pushing every state to lower its ceiling limit, tighten the definition of the unit against which the ceiling was measured so paper transfers among relatives could no longer defeat it, and prune the exemption lists; most states, Maharashtra included, amended their own Acts in response. Maharashtra's statute is the Maharashtra Agricultural Lands (Ceiling on Holdings) Act, 1961, substantially revised by the Maharashtra Agricultural Lands (Lowering of Ceiling on Holdings) and (Amendment) Act, 1972, which also treated land transfers made shortly before the amendment as presumptively made to evade the new, lower limit. Because legislation of this kind is aimed at redistributing surplus agricultural land to the landless and to marginal farmers, laws of this type have historically been given special constitutional protection by being placed in the Ninth Schedule — a protection the Supreme Court narrowed in I.R. Coelho v. State of Tamil Nadu (2007), holding that any law added to the Ninth Schedule after 24 April 1973 remains open to judicial review if it damages the Constitution's basic structure. That is the topic worth carrying forward from this item, independent of which specific statement pairing the commission had in mind before it withdrew the question.

A land ceiling is a cap-and-redistribute tool: state legislatures fix a maximum area of agricultural land a person or family unit may hold, require declaration of everything held above that line as 'surplus', and empower the state to take over the surplus for redistribution, typically to landless agricultural labourers and marginal farmers. It sits alongside, but is legally and conceptually distinct from, other Indian land-reform instruments such as abolition of intermediary tenures (zamindari abolition), tenancy reform (regulating rent and giving tenants occupancy rights), and consolidation of holdings (merging a farmer's scattered, fragmented plots into a single contiguous block to improve efficiency — a reform about the shape and location of one person's land, not its total area).

MPSC's economy and polity sections regularly test the machinery of India's land-reform legislation — what each instrument (ceiling, tenancy reform, consolidation, abolition of intermediary tenures) actually does, and how it differs from the others — because these Acts, though decades old, remain the legal basis for a large share of India's rural land records and disputes even today. The habit this item rewards is not memorising a single state's numbers but recognising the general legislative architecture: a ceiling law has to define what counts as 'holding', fix the limit, provide a mechanism for identifying and taking surplus, and guard against evasion, and Maharashtra's 1961 Act (as tightened in 1972) is a standard example students are expected to recognise by name.

• The Union government's 1972 national guidelines pushed all states to lower their agricultural land ceiling limits and tighten the definition of the holding unit used to calculate them.
• Maharashtra's principal ceiling statute is the Maharashtra Agricultural Lands (Ceiling on Holdings) Act, 1961, substantially revised by the Maharashtra Agricultural Lands (Lowering of Ceiling on Holdings) and (Amendment) Act, 1972.
• Land consolidation — merging a farmer's fragmented plots into one contiguous holding — is a separate land-reform instrument from a land ceiling, which caps total area rather than reshaping plot boundaries.
• In I.R. Coelho v. State of Tamil Nadu (2007), a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court held that laws inserted into the Ninth Schedule after 24 April 1973 are not automatically immune from judicial review and can still be tested against the basic structure doctrine.

• Confusing 'ceiling on holdings' (a cap on total area) with 'consolidation of holdings' (reshaping fragmented plots into one block) — they are different reforms with different goals
• Assuming a cancelled MPSC question still has a recoverable 'correct' answer somewhere in the public domain — the commission does not publish one
• Treating every Ninth Schedule law as permanently immune from judicial review — immunity after I.R. Coelho (2007) depends on when the law was added to the Schedule

MPSC frequently frames land-reform questions as a set of short statements to be sorted into correct and incorrect, testing whether a candidate can tell apart neighbouring but distinct legislative tools (ceiling, consolidation, tenancy reform, conversion of land use) rather than just recalling that 'land reform happened'.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Union government's 1972 national guidelines on agricultural land ceiling laws primarily required states to do which of the following ?

  • (a)Abolish all agricultural land ceilings in favour of free-market land transactions
  • (b)Lower ceiling limits, tighten the definition of the holding unit, and narrow exemption lists
  • (c)Transfer all ceiling-surplus land directly to state government farms
  • (d)Replace state ceiling Acts with a single central Land Ceiling Act

  Answer(b) Lower ceiling limits, tighten the definition of the holding unit, and narrow exemption lists — the 1972 guidelines pushed states to close the loopholes that had let large holdings survive the first generation of 1950s-60s ceiling laws.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Maharashtra's principal statute capping agricultural land holdings, later revised to lower the ceiling limit, is officially known as ?

  • (a)The Bombay Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act, 1948
  • (b)The Maharashtra Land Revenue Code, 1966
  • (c)The Maharashtra Agricultural Lands (Ceiling on Holdings) Act, 1961
  • (d)The Maharashtra Consolidation of Holdings Act, 1947

  Answer(c) The Maharashtra Agricultural Lands (Ceiling on Holdings) Act, 1961 — revised by the Maharashtra Agricultural Lands (Lowering of Ceiling on Holdings) and (Amendment) Act, 1972 to align with the Union government's national guidelines of the same year.