The power to recruit the Secretarial staff of the House of the People is vested in:

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, President after consultation with the Speaker of the House of the people. The governing provision is Article 98, and within it the operative clause is Article 98(3). Read the article in its three steps. Article 98(1) begins: 'Each House of Parliament shall have a separate secretarial staff', with a proviso that this shall not be construed as preventing the creation of posts common to both Houses. Article 98(2) then provides that Parliament 'may by law regulate the recruitment, and the conditions of service of persons appointed, to the secretarial staff of either House of Parliament'. Article 98(3) supplies what governs in the meantime: 'Until provision is made by Parliament under clause (2), the President may, after consultation with the Speaker of the House of the People or the Chairman of the Council of States, as the case may be, make rules regulating the recruitment, and the conditions of service of persons appointed, to the secretarial staff of the House of the People or the Council of States, and any rules so made shall have effect subject to the provisions of any law made under the said clause.' Option (d) reproduces that clause almost word for word — the rule-making authority is the President, the Speaker is the consultee where the House of the People is concerned, and the House named in the question is the House of the People, which is the Constitution's own name for the Lok Sabha (Article 79). Get the clause number right, because this is where cards and coaching notes routinely slip: it is 98(3), not 98(2). Clause (2) vests the power in Parliament by law; clause (3) is the interim fallback the Constitution builds in so that neither House is ever left without a staffing rule, and it expressly yields to any law Parliament later makes. Behind the drafting lies a straightforward separation-of-powers idea: a legislature whose clerks, reporters, researchers and committee officers were recruited by the executive's own agencies would depend on the very government it exists to scrutinise. So the Constitution gives each House a secretariat of its own and keeps the rule-making inside the President–Speaker channel.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The PMO is the Prime Minister's own secretariat inside the executive; it is not a recruiting agency for anybody, not even for the Government's own services, and it finds no mention in the Constitution. It attracts candidates who read 'in whom is the power vested' as 'who is the most powerful office'. Article 98(1)'s separate secretariat exists precisely to keep the executive's core office out of the legislature's staffing.  (b) The most respectable wrong answer, because the UPSC genuinely is the Constitution's recruiting body — Article 320(1) makes it the duty of the Union Public Service Commission to conduct examinations for appointments to the services of the Union, and Articles 315 to 323 constitute and protect it. But the secretariat of a House of Parliament is not a service of the Union under executive control; Article 98 carves it out and routes it through the President with the Speaker consulted.  (c) The Staff Selection Commission works under the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions and recruits Group B and Group C staff for the Ministries and Departments of the Government of India. Every element of that remit is executive, and the SSC is a body created by executive decision, not by the Constitution. Its familiarity to candidates as 'the clerical-recruitment body' is exactly what makes it tempting here, and exactly why it is wrong.

Concept: A recurring device in the Constitution is to let an institution that must stand apart from the executive control, or at least insulate, its own staff — and the standard drafting formula for it is 'X, after consultation with Y'. Article 98 does this for Parliament: each House has a separate secretarial staff, Parliament may legislate on recruitment, and until it does the President makes the rules after consulting the Speaker or the Chairman. Article 187 repeats the design word-for-word one level down for the States: each House of a State legislature has a separate secretarial staff, the State legislature may legislate, and until then the Governor makes rules after consultation with the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly or the Chairman of the Legislative Council. The judiciary gets a stronger version: under Article 146(1) appointments of officers and servants of the Supreme Court are made by the Chief Justice of India or such other Judge or officer as he may direct, and Article 229(1) gives the Chief Justice of a High Court the same power for that Court. Article 148(5) applies the same formula to audit — the conditions of service of persons serving in the Indian Audit and Accounts Department are prescribed by rules made by the President after consultation with the Comptroller and Auditor-General. Once the pattern is visible, a whole family of exam questions collapses into one idea: the more an institution is meant to check the government, the further its staffing is kept from the government's recruiting machinery.

State PCS 2025 Q56 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q56 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer