In present times, Right to Property has been accepted in the Indian Constitution in which of the following forms?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, a legal right. The 44th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1978 deleted Article 19(1)(f) (the right to acquire, hold and dispose of property) and Article 31 (compulsory acquisition of property) from Part III, and inserted Article 300A in Part XII under the heading 'Right to property': 'No person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law.' So the right survives in the Constitution — but outside the chapter on Fundamental Rights. In practical terms that changes the remedy: a person whose property is taken without authority of law cannot move the Supreme Court directly under Article 32 (which is available only for Fundamental Rights); the remedy lies in a High Court under Article 226 or in the ordinary courts. Note also that Article 300A protects 'any person', not only citizens — unlike the old Article 19(1)(f), which was a citizens-only right.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) True until 1978, not after. The right to property was a Fundamental Right under Articles 19(1)(f) and 31 in the original Constitution; the 44th Amendment removed both. The question's words 'in present times' are there precisely to close this option.  (b) The right to property has never been a Directive Principle. Part IV does touch property policy — Article 39(b) and (c) speak of distributing material resources to serve the common good and of preventing concentration of wealth — but that is a direction to the State, not a right of the individual.  (c) The most tempting distractor, and not baseless — the Supreme Court has more than once described the right to property as a human or constitutional right when the State has taken land without following the law. But 'human right' is not a category the Constitution uses to classify rights. Within the Constitution's own scheme, after 1978 the right sits in Article 300A as a legal (constitutional) right — the classification the official key accepts.

Concept: The Constitution grades rights by where they are placed. Rights in Part III are Fundamental Rights, directly enforceable in the Supreme Court under Article 32. Rights placed elsewhere in the Constitution are constitutional or legal rights: they bind the State just as much, but the remedy is an ordinary writ or suit, not Article 32. Property moved from the first category to the second in 1978, after nearly three decades of collision between land reform legislation and Articles 19(1)(f) and 31 — a collision that had produced the First Amendment, the Ninth Schedule, and a long line of litigation.

State PCS 2025 Q75 — Indian Polity PYQ with Answer

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