MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 62 of 100

Correct — option (4), only statements (a) and (b). Read the statement list carefully before you start: this question prints FIVE items, labelled (a) to (e), not the usual four, and a candidate who scans the options without noticing the extra item will misread every one of them. The question asks which committees are joint bodies, that is, which draw their members from the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha together rather than from one House alone. Statement (a), the Committee on the Welfare of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, is such a body: it has thirty members, twenty elected from the Lok Sabha and ten from the Rajya Sabha. Statement (b), the Committee on Empowerment of Women, is built on exactly the same pattern — thirty members, twenty from the Lok Sabha and ten from the Rajya Sabha — and the parallel is not an accident, since both committees exist to watch over the working of the government's programmes for a group whose welfare Parliament as a whole has taken responsibility for, and neither would carry the same authority if only one House were represented on it. The other three are not joint bodies, and each fails for a different reason worth knowing. The Business Advisory Committee is a committee of internal management, existing to allot time to the items of business the House proposes to take up; each House therefore constitutes its own, and the presiding officer of that House is its chairman, so that the Speaker chairs the Lok Sabha's fifteen-member committee and the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha chairs the Rajya Sabha's. Two Houses that sit separately and set their own agendas could not share such a committee. The Committee of Privileges fails on the same logic: a breach of privilege is a breach of the privilege of a particular House and its members, and each House examines complaints against its own privilege through its own committee, the Lok Sabha's having fifteen members. The Estimates Committee is the odd one out among the financial committees and is by far the most commonly missed item in this question. It has thirty members and all thirty are members of the Lok Sabha, elected by the House from among its own members by proportional representation through the single transferable vote; the Rajya Sabha has no representation on it at all. The reason is constitutional rather than administrative: the Estimates Committee exists to scrutinise the estimates of expenditure embodied in the Budget, and financial control belongs to the House that alone can be asked to grant supply. Since only statements (a) and (b) describe joint committees, the answer is option (4).

• (1)(a), (b) and (d) — This option is right about statements (a) and (b) and wrong about statement (d), the Committee of Privileges, which is constituted separately by each House and never jointly. The reason is worth understanding rather than memorising. Parliamentary privilege is not a single national possession but the privilege of each House, of its committees and of its individual members, and a question of privilege therefore arises in the House whose privilege is alleged to have been breached. The Speaker refers such a question to the Lok Sabha's Committee of Privileges, which has fifteen members nominated by the Speaker, and the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha refers a question arising in that House to the Rajya Sabha's own committee. It would make no sense for members of one House to sit in judgment on a breach of the other House's privilege, and no such combined committee exists. The wider point for the exam is that committees concerned with the internal discipline, procedure and business of a House are always single-House bodies, while committees that oversee the executive or a class of citizens are the ones likely to be joint.
• (2)Only (b) and (c) — This option keeps statement (b) but drops statement (a) and adds statement (c), the Business Advisory Committee, which is not a joint body. Each House has its own Business Advisory Committee, and its function explains why: it recommends the allotment of time for the discussion of the items of legislative and other business the House proposes to take up, and it then reports that timetable to the House, which normally accepts it. Since each House frames its own list of business and sits on its own days, a shared committee could not do the job. A further feature distinguishes it from the committees a candidate is more likely to remember: it is chaired by the presiding officer himself, the Speaker for the Lok Sabha's fifteen-member committee and the Chairman for the Rajya Sabha's, whereas the chairmen of the financial and welfare committees are appointed by the Speaker from among their members. Dropping statement (a), which names a genuine joint committee, is the second error in the option, and either one alone is enough to eliminate it.
• (3)(c), (d) and (e) — This option gets all three of its items wrong, and it is the cleanest illustration of what the question is testing. Statement (c), the Business Advisory Committee, and statement (d), the Committee of Privileges, are constituted separately by each House because both deal with the internal business and internal discipline of the House concerned. Statement (e), the Estimates Committee, is a Lok Sabha committee alone: all thirty of its members are elected by the Lok Sabha from among its members, and no member of the Rajya Sabha sits on it. That last is the single fact this question is built to catch, because the Estimates Committee is usually learnt alongside the Public Accounts Committee and the Committee on Public Undertakings, and both of those do carry Rajya Sabha members — fifteen from the Lok Sabha and seven from the Rajya Sabha each. A candidate who has filed all three financial committees under one heading will assume the Estimates Committee is joint as well. It is not, and the reason is that scrutiny of the estimates of expenditure follows the House that grants supply.

Parliament does the bulk of its detailed work through committees, and the exam-relevant question about any of them is a small, fixed set of attributes: how many members, from which House or Houses, chosen how, chaired by whom, and for what purpose. On the question of which House, the committees fall into three groups. Some are joint, drawing members from both Houses: the Public Accounts Committee and the Committee on Public Undertakings have twenty-two members each, fifteen from the Lok Sabha and seven from the Rajya Sabha; the Committee on the Welfare of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and the Committee on Empowerment of Women have thirty each, twenty from the Lok Sabha and ten from the Rajya Sabha. Some belong to one House alone, of which the Estimates Committee is the leading example, with thirty members all from the Lok Sabha. And some exist in duplicate, one version in each House with its own members — the Business Advisory Committee, the Committee of Privileges, the Rules Committee, the Committee on Petitions and the other committees of internal procedure. The pattern behind the three groups is not arbitrary. A committee that supervises the executive or a class of citizens can sensibly speak for the whole Parliament and is therefore joint; a committee that manages the time, the rules or the dignity of a particular House must belong to that House; and a committee that follows the money follows the House that votes it. The members of the elected committees are chosen by the House by proportional representation through the single transferable vote, which secures representation for the smaller parties, and a Minister cannot be elected to the financial committees.

Parliamentary committees are among the most reliably examined topics in the polity section of an MPSC paper, and the composition question is the Commission's favourite form because it can be marked without argument. This item is a good example of how such a question is built: the list mixes two joint committees with one single-House committee and two committees that exist separately in each House, so a candidate who knows the general idea but not the particular bodies has no way to guess. Notice also the shape of the question itself. It prints five statements, labelled (a) to (e), where four is the usual number in this paper, and a candidate reading quickly will map the labels wrongly onto the options. Counting the items before reading the options is a two-second habit that protects against a whole class of avoidable losses; eighteen questions in this paper print a statement list that is not four items long. The content trap here is the Estimates Committee, which is grouped with the Public Accounts Committee and the Committee on Public Undertakings in every textbook as one of the three financial committees, and which differs from both of them precisely on the point this question asks about. Whenever a topic is taught as a group of similar things, the examinable fact is usually the one on which the members of the group differ, and a candidate preparing committees should go looking for those differences rather than for what the committees have in common.

• The Committee on the Welfare of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes has thirty members — twenty from the Lok Sabha and ten from the Rajya Sabha — and is therefore a joint committee drawing on both Houses.
• The Committee on Empowerment of Women is built on the same pattern, with thirty members of whom twenty come from the Lok Sabha and ten from the Rajya Sabha.
• The Estimates Committee has thirty members, all of them from the Lok Sabha and none from the Rajya Sabha; they are elected by the House from among its members by proportional representation through the single transferable vote, and a Minister cannot be elected to it.
• The Public Accounts Committee and the Committee on Public Undertakings each have twenty-two members — fifteen from the Lok Sabha and seven from the Rajya Sabha — so two of the three financial committees are joint and the Estimates Committee is not.
• The Business Advisory Committee and the Committee of Privileges are constituted separately in each House; the Lok Sabha's version of each has fifteen members, and the Business Advisory Committee is chaired by the presiding officer of the House himself.

• Assuming that the Estimates Committee is joint because the other two financial committees are; it is a Lok Sabha committee alone, and this is the single fact most questions on committee composition are built around
• Reading a five-item statement list as though it had four items, which misaligns every option; this question prints statements (a) to (e)
• Confusing committees that exist separately in each House, such as the Business Advisory Committee and the Committee of Privileges, with committees that do not exist in the Rajya Sabha at all
• Forgetting that the Business Advisory Committee is chaired by the presiding officer himself, unlike the financial and welfare committees whose chairmen are appointed by the Speaker from among the members

MPSC asks about parliamentary committees in four regular shapes: the number of members and their distribution between the Houses, as here; who appoints or chairs the committee; what the committee does; and which committee is or is not mentioned in the Constitution. The composition question dominates because it is unambiguous, and because a candidate either has the numbers or does not. The efficient preparation is a single table with one row per committee and columns for total members, Lok Sabha members, Rajya Sabha members, who appoints the chairman, the term and the function. Fill it in for the three financial committees, the two welfare committees, the departmentally related standing committees and the main committees of internal procedure, and almost every question that can be set is answerable from it. Pay particular attention to the rows that break the pattern of their neighbours — the Estimates Committee's absent Rajya Sabha column, the Public Accounts Committee's chairman drawn from the opposition, the Business Advisory Committee's chairman being the Speaker himself — because those are the rows the Commission converts into questions.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following parliamentary committees has no member of the Rajya Sabha on it ?

  • (a)Public Accounts Committee
  • (b)Committee on Public Undertakings
  • (c)Estimates Committee
  • (d)Committee on Empowerment of Women

  Answer(c) Estimates Committee. All thirty of its members are members of the Lok Sabha, elected by that House from among its own members by proportional representation through the single transferable vote, and the Rajya Sabha is not represented on it. The Public Accounts Committee and the Committee on Public Undertakings each have twenty-two members, fifteen from the Lok Sabha and seven from the Rajya Sabha, and the Committee on Empowerment of Women has thirty, twenty from the Lok Sabha and ten from the Rajya Sabha.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Business Advisory Committee of the Lok Sabha is chaired by which of the following ?

  • (a)The Speaker of the Lok Sabha
  • (b)The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha
  • (c)The Minister of Parliamentary Affairs
  • (d)A member elected by the committee from among its own members

  Answer(a) The Speaker of the Lok Sabha. The Business Advisory Committee recommends how the time of the House should be allotted among the items of business it proposes to take up, and the presiding officer of the House chairs it himself — the Speaker in the Lok Sabha and the Chairman in the Rajya Sabha, which constitutes its own separate committee. This distinguishes it from the financial and welfare committees, whose chairmen are appointed by the Speaker from among the members of the committee.