MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 34 of 100

Correct — option (4), All of the above. Take the four printed statements in turn. Statement (a) says the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes is a constitutional body which came into existence in 2004, and that is right on both counts. It was created by the Constitution (Eighty-ninth Amendment) Act of 2003, which inserted Article 338A and split the former combined National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes into two separate commissions, and the new Scheduled Tribes commission came into existence in February 2004. Being constitutional rather than statutory is the distinction that matters here: the Commission owes its existence to the Constitution itself and not to an Act of Parliament, so its functions, its powers and the duty of governments to consult it are written into the constitutional text. Statement (b) reproduces one of those functions almost word for word — the Constitution requires the Commission to inquire into specific complaints with respect to the deprivation of rights and safeguards of the Scheduled Tribes — and it is the function most people associate with the body. Statements (c) and (d) are the ones a candidate hesitates over, because neither literacy nor the empowerment of tribal women is named in the constitutional text as a separate head. They do not need to be. The same clause of Article 338A that requires the Commission to inquire into complaints also requires it to participate in and advise on the planning process of the socio-economic development of the Scheduled Tribes and to evaluate the progress of that development under the Union and under any state, and to recommend in its reports to the President the measures that should be taken for the protection, the welfare and the socio-economic development of the Scheduled Tribes. Education and literacy are among the most basic components of socio-economic development, and the position of tribal women — who bear the disadvantages of tribal status and of gender together — falls squarely within welfare and development so understood. The Constitution further empowers the President to specify additional functions relating to the protection, welfare, development and advancement of the Scheduled Tribes, which confirms that the developmental mandate is meant to be read broadly rather than narrowly. The Commission is therefore not merely a grievance forum but a body with an advisory and developmental role, and the Union and every state government are required to consult it on all major policy matters affecting Scheduled Tribes. All four statements standing, option (4) is the answer.

• (1)Only (a) — This option accepts only statement (a), the constitutional status and the year, and rejects everything about what the Commission does. It cannot be right, because statement (b) is not an interpretation of the Commission's role but a near-verbatim reproduction of a function written into Article 338A: to inquire into specific complaints with respect to the deprivation of rights and safeguards of the Scheduled Tribes. A candidate who selects this option has usually recognised the one fact he is sure of — that the body is constitutional and dates from 2004 — and treated the rest of the page as unverifiable. The three wrong options in this question form a ladder, each accepting one more statement than the last, and this is its bottom rung; climbing it correctly is a matter of knowing how far the Commission's mandate extends, not of guessing how many statements an examiner is likely to have made true.
• (2)Only (a) and (b) — This option accepts (a) and (b) and rejects the two developmental statements, and it is the choice of a candidate who has read Article 338A carefully but too literally. The reasoning runs that the Constitution names investigation of safeguards and inquiry into complaints as the Commission's functions, that literacy and women's empowerment are nowhere named, and that a body confined to safeguards cannot be said to work on either. The premise about the text is wrong. The same clause requires the Commission to participate in and advise on the planning of the socio-economic development of the Scheduled Tribes, to evaluate the progress of that development, and to recommend measures for their protection, welfare and socio-economic development; and a further provision lets the President specify additional functions relating to their protection, welfare, development and advancement. A mandate framed in those words is not confined to grievances.
• (3)Only (a), (b) and (c) — This option accepts (a), (b) and (c) and rejects only the statement about tribal women, which makes it the most discriminating of the three errors and the one a well-prepared candidate is most likely to make. Having accepted that socio-economic development covers literacy, there is no principled ground left on which to exclude the position of tribal women, who are among the groups the Commission's protective and developmental mandate most obviously reaches, since they carry the disadvantages of tribal status and of gender at the same time. The hesitation usually comes from the printing rather than from the law: the English statement is worded with a visible redundancy, women empowerment of Tribal women, and a reader who notices the clumsiness may take it for a sign that the statement has been tampered with. Awkward drafting is not falsity, and this paper contains a good deal of it.

The Constitution's machinery for the Scheduled Tribes has three layers and the National Commission belongs to the third. The first layer is definitional: Article 366(25) defines Scheduled Tribes by reference to Article 342, under which the President specifies the tribes of a state by public notification after consulting the Governor, and only Parliament by law may thereafter include or exclude a community. The second layer is protective and developmental in substance — reservation in legislatures, in services and in education, the special provisions for the administration of Scheduled Areas and tribal areas under the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, and the Governor's reporting duty in respect of Scheduled Areas. The third layer is institutional oversight, and this is where Article 338A sits. Until 2003 a single National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes served both groups under Article 338; the Eighty-ninth Amendment separated them, leaving Article 338 to the Scheduled Castes and inserting Article 338A for a distinct National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, which came into existence in 2004. The Commission consists of a Chairperson, a Vice-Chairperson and three other members appointed by the President. Its functions run wider than the grievance role for which it is best known: it investigates and monitors all matters relating to the constitutional and legal safeguards for Scheduled Tribes and evaluates how those safeguards are working, inquires into specific complaints of the deprivation of rights, participates in and advises on the planning of socio-economic development and evaluates its progress, reports annually to the President, and recommends measures for the protection, welfare and socio-economic development of the Scheduled Tribes. In discharging the investigative functions it has the powers of a civil court trying a suit — summoning witnesses, requiring the production of documents, receiving evidence on affidavit and requisitioning public records. The Union and every state government are obliged to consult it on all major policy matters affecting Scheduled Tribes. Its recommendations, however, are not binding, which is the standing limitation on all such commissions and the usual subject of criticism.

Constitutional bodies are a fixed and heavily weighted part of the MPSC polity syllabus, and the Commission tests them along four axes: the article that creates the body, whether it is constitutional or statutory, its composition, and its functions. This question uses the fourth axis and is built on a specific and recurring misconception — that a commission for a disadvantaged group exists only to hear complaints. The four statements are graded so that the two easy ones establish status and the complaint function, while the two harder ones test whether the candidate knows that the constitutional mandate extends to planning, development and welfare. That grading is visible in the option set, where the three wrong choices accept one, two and three statements respectively, so the question effectively asks how far the candidate's reading of Article 338A goes. Tribal affairs carry extra weight in a Maharashtra paper: the state has a substantial Scheduled Tribe population, Scheduled Areas administered under the Fifth Schedule, and a long history of tribal sub-plan expenditure and of litigation over forest and land rights, so the Commission, the Governor's powers in Scheduled Areas and the Forest Rights Act are all live subjects. One printing point deserves notice, since the transcription records it: the abbreviation appears in square brackets in the English stem and in round brackets in the Marathi, and the English fourth statement carries a redundancy, women empowerment of Tribal women. Neither affects the answer, and a candidate should train himself not to read a printing infelicity as a planted error.

• The National Commission for Scheduled Tribes is a constitutional body created by the Constitution (Eighty-ninth Amendment) Act of 2003, which inserted Article 338A and separated the earlier combined commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes; the Scheduled Tribes commission came into existence in 2004.
• Article 338A requires the Commission to investigate and monitor all matters relating to the safeguards for Scheduled Tribes, to inquire into specific complaints of the deprivation of rights and safeguards, to participate in and advise on the planning of their socio-economic development and evaluate its progress, and to report annually to the President.
• The same article requires the Commission to recommend measures for the protection, welfare and socio-economic development of the Scheduled Tribes, and allows the President to specify further functions relating to their protection, welfare, development and advancement — which is why literacy and the position of tribal women fall within its mandate.
• The Commission consists of a Chairperson, a Vice-Chairperson and three other members appointed by the President, and while investigating or inquiring it has the powers of a civil court trying a suit, including summoning witnesses, requiring production of documents and requisitioning public records.
• The Union and every state government must consult the Commission on all major policy matters affecting Scheduled Tribes, but its recommendations are advisory and not binding, which is the standing limitation on bodies of this kind.

• Treating a commission for a disadvantaged group as a grievance forum alone, when Article 338A also gives the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes an advisory role in development planning and a duty to recommend welfare measures
• Confusing constitutional status with binding power, since the Commission's recommendations remain advisory even though the body itself is created by the Constitution
• Dating the Commission from the amendment rather than from its constitution, or attributing it to Article 338, which after 2003 relates to the Scheduled Castes
• Reading an awkwardly worded statement as a planted error, when this paper contains many printing infelicities that have no bearing on whether a statement is true

Constitutional bodies are examined in MPSC papers almost every year and in a predictable set of shapes: identify the article, distinguish constitutional from statutory bodies, state the composition and tenure, and list the functions. Function questions are the most frequently set as statement lists, because the constitutional text supplies several clauses that can be turned into statements and because candidates typically remember one function and forget the rest. Commissions dealing with Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Backward Classes and minorities are often set against one another, so the differences matter: which are constitutional and which statutory, which article creates each, and which of them acquired constitutional status and when. For Maharashtra specifically, expect tribal questions to reach beyond the Commission into the Fifth Schedule, the Panchayats extension law and forest rights, since the state has extensive Scheduled Areas and a large Scheduled Tribe population.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The National Commission for Scheduled Tribes was created as a separate body by which constitutional amendment, and under which article does it function ?

  • (a)The Sixty-fifth Amendment, under Article 338
  • (b)The Eighty-ninth Amendment of 2003, under Article 338A
  • (c)The 102nd Amendment, under Article 338B
  • (d)The Seventy-third Amendment, under Article 243D

  Answer(b) The Eighty-ninth Amendment of 2003, under Article 338A. Before that amendment a single commission served both the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes under Article 338; the amendment left Article 338 to the Scheduled Castes and inserted Article 338A for a distinct Scheduled Tribes commission, which came into existence in 2004. Article 338B, inserted much later, relates to the National Commission for Backward Classes, and Article 243D concerns reservation of seats in panchayats.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following is a function of the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes under the Constitution, besides inquiring into complaints about the deprivation of rights ?

  • (a)To make rules for the reservation of seats in state legislatures
  • (b)To participate in and advise on the planning process of the socio-economic development of the Scheduled Tribes and to evaluate its progress
  • (c)To notify communities as Scheduled Tribes in a state by public notification
  • (d)To hear appeals against orders of the state administrative tribunals

  Answer(b) To participate in and advise on the planning process of the socio-economic development of the Scheduled Tribes and to evaluate its progress. This developmental role sits in the same clause of Article 338A as the complaint function, and it is why the Commission's mandate reaches matters such as education and the position of tribal women. Notifying a community as a Scheduled Tribe is the President's function under Article 342, subject to Parliament's power to include or exclude, and is not exercised by the Commission.