The Constitution 105th amendment act, 2021 related to the socially and educationally backward classes, amends _________ articles of Indian Constitution.

Question

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Correct — option (4), three. The Constitution (One Hundred and Fifth Amendment) Act, 2021, which received the President's assent on 18 August 2021, works on three articles of the Constitution: Article 338B, Article 342A and Article 366. To see why those three and no others, it helps to know what the amendment was undoing. The Constitution (One Hundred and Second Amendment) Act, 2018 had inserted Article 338B, giving constitutional status to the National Commission for Backward Classes, along with Article 342A on the specification of socially and educationally backward classes and a matching definition of that expression in Article 366. In May 2021, deciding the Maratha reservation case, Jaishri Laxmanrao Patil against the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, the Supreme Court read those provisions as having taken away from the States the power to identify their own socially and educationally backward classes and vested it in the President alone. Parliament moved within three months to restore the position. The amendment recast Article 342A so that the list notified by the President is described as the Central List and added a new clause providing that notwithstanding that list, every State and Union territory may by law prepare and maintain, for its own purposes, its own list of socially and educationally backward classes. It amended Article 338B, whose scheme required the Union and the States to consult the National Commission for Backward Classes on all major policy matters affecting these classes, so that the obligation does not stand in the way of a State preparing its own list. And it amended Article 366, the definitions article, so that the definition of the expression matches the new two-list arrangement. Three articles, therefore, and the count in the keyed option follows directly. Two further points are worth carrying away because examiners build questions on them. The first is the number gap: the measure was introduced in Parliament as the Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Amendment) Bill, 2021, and became the One Hundred and Fifth Amendment Act — a bill number and an act number never match, because bills are numbered as introduced and acts as enacted, and many bills lapse. The second is what the amendment did not do. It restored a power of identification; it did not create any new reservation, did not amend Article 15 or Article 16, and did not disturb the ceiling on the total extent of reservation laid down by the Supreme Court in the Indra Sawhney case.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Two is the count a candidate reaches by remembering the substantive change and the definition that follows it — Article 342A and Article 366 — while overlooking Article 338B. But Article 338B had to be touched, and for a reason that goes to the heart of the amendment. That article is the one that constitutionalised the National Commission for Backward Classes and required the Union and the State governments to consult it on all major policy matters affecting socially and educationally backward classes. If a State is now to prepare and maintain its own list by its own law, that consultation requirement cannot be read as controlling the exercise, and the article had to be amended accordingly. The lesson for the examination hall is that an amendment which changes who exercises a power usually has to adjust the machinery attached to that power as well, so counting only the article carrying the substantive change tends to undercount.  (b) Four overcounts, and the usual way of arriving at it is to add Article 15 or Article 16 to the list — the two articles that actually authorise reservation for backward classes in educational institutions and in public employment. Neither was touched. This is the most valuable distinction in the whole topic, and it is worth stating plainly: the articles that permit reservation are Article 15(4), Article 15(5) and Article 16(4); the articles that govern who identifies the classes entitled to it are Articles 340, 342A and 338B. The 105th Amendment operated entirely on the second group. It restored to the States the power to say which communities are socially and educationally backward for their own purposes, and it left untouched both the power to make reservations and the limits on that power, including the ceiling laid down in the Indra Sawhney judgment.  (c) Five is further from the mark still, and no reading of the Act reaches it. The amendment is a short one, aimed at a single, narrow object — reversing the effect of a judicial interpretation on the question of who may identify socially and educationally backward classes — and short amendments of that kind characteristically touch two or three articles. The contrast with a wide-ranging amendment is instructive and is itself examinable: the Forty-second Amendment of 1976 altered dozens of provisions across the Preamble, the Fundamental Rights, the Directive Principles and the judiciary, whereas an amendment passed to correct one line of interpretation does not need to range widely. Reading the object of an amendment therefore gives a useful check on any number offered for the count of articles it changed.

Concept: The constitutional scheme for backward classes has three layers. Article 15(4), Article 15(5) and Article 16(4) permit the State to make special provision for socially and educationally backward classes in education and in public employment; Article 340 empowers the President to appoint a commission to investigate their conditions, the provision under which the Kalelkar and Mandal Commissions were appointed; and Articles 338B and 342A, both inserted by the 102nd Amendment Act of 2018, deal respectively with the National Commission for Backward Classes as a constitutional body and with the notification of the classes themselves. The Constitution nowhere defines who is socially and educationally backward, which is why the identification machinery matters so much. The 102nd Amendment was read by the Supreme Court in the Maratha reservation case of May 2021 as having centralised identification in the President, leaving the States without the power to maintain their own lists — a serious practical difficulty, since State lists for State services and State educational institutions had existed for decades. The Constitution (One Hundred and Fifth Amendment) Act, 2021, assented to on 18 August 2021, restored that power: the presidential list became the Central List, every State and Union territory was empowered to prepare and maintain its own list by law for its own purposes, the consultation requirement in Article 338B was adjusted, and the definition in Article 366 was aligned. What the amendment did not touch is as important as what it did: the extent of reservation, and the ceiling on it laid down in Indra Sawhney against Union of India, were left exactly as they were.

State PCS 2021 Q71 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q71 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer