According to the 74th amendment act, 1992 of the Indian Constitution there are _________ types of Municipalities in urban India.

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), three. The Constitution (Seventy-fourth Amendment) Act, 1992 inserted Part IX-A, 'The Municipalities', into the Constitution as Articles 243P to 243ZG, together with the Twelfth Schedule, and brought it into force on 1 June 1993. The provision the question is built on is Article 243Q, which says that there shall be constituted in every State — and here it names exactly three bodies and no more — a Nagar Panchayat for a transitional area, that is an area in transition from a rural area to an urban area; a Municipal Council for a smaller urban area; and a Municipal Corporation for a larger urban area. That is the whole constitutional list: three types of Municipality. Everything else about the classification is left to the Governor. Article 243Q(2) tells the Governor what to weigh when he decides, by public notification, whether an area is a transitional area, a smaller urban area or a larger urban area: the population of the area, the density of population in it, the revenue generated for local administration, the percentage of employment in non-agricultural activities, the economic importance of the area, and such other factors as he may think fit. So the Constitution fixes the number of categories at three but fixes no population threshold for any of them, which is why the population at which a council becomes a corporation differs from State to State and is set by State law — in Maharashtra by the Maharashtra Municipal Corporation Act (originally the Bombay Provincial Municipal Corporations Act, 1949) and the Maharashtra Municipal Councils, Nagar Panchayats and Industrial Townships Act, 1965. One qualification sits in the proviso to Article 243Q(1) and is worth carrying because it is examined: a Municipality need not be constituted in an urban area or part of it which the Governor, having regard to the size of the area and the municipal services being provided or proposed by an industrial establishment, specifies by public notification as an industrial township. That is an exception to the duty to constitute a Municipality, not a fourth type of Municipality. The answer the Commission wants is therefore the count in Article 243Q itself — three.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Two is the answer of a candidate who remembers only the pair everybody has seen — the Municipal Council in a district town and the Municipal Corporation in a city — and forgets the category the Seventy-fourth Amendment actually added to the scheme. The Nagar Panchayat is the newest of the three and the one most often dropped: it is the body for a transitional area, a place that is ceasing to be a village and has not yet become a proper town, and its whole purpose is to give such a place an urban local government instead of leaving it under a Gram Panchayat until its population catches up. Miss it and the count falls to two. It is also the type most likely to be in the news in Maharashtra, because transitional areas are regularly upgraded — a Gram Panchayat becomes a Nagar Panchayat, and a Nagar Panchayat later becomes a Municipal Council.  (c) Four is what a candidate reaches by adding the Cantonment Board to the three named in Article 243Q, and it is a genuine confusion rather than a careless one, because a Cantonment Board really does run a civic administration and really does exist alongside the three. But it is not a Municipality under Part IX-A at all. Cantonments are a Union subject and Cantonment Boards are constituted under a Central law administered by the Ministry of Defence, with a mixed elected-and-nominated composition in which the station commander presides — nothing in Article 243Q creates them and nothing in Part IX-A governs them. The industrial township of the proviso to Article 243Q(1) misleads in exactly the same way: it is a reason for not constituting a Municipality in an area whose civic services an industrial establishment already provides, not a fourth species of Municipality.  (d) Five belongs to a different list. Standard textbook treatments of urban local government in India enumerate eight kinds of urban body — municipal corporation, municipality, notified area committee, town area committee, cantonment board, township, port trust and special purpose agency — and a candidate half-recalling that longer enumeration reaches for a number bigger than three without being able to say which five. The distinction the question is testing is the one between a statutory or administrative classification of urban bodies, which is long and varies with the State, and the CONSTITUTIONAL classification in Article 243Q, which is short and is the same everywhere: Nagar Panchayat, Municipal Council, Municipal Corporation. Notified area committees and town area committees are creatures of State municipal law, not of Part IX-A, and their existence does not change the constitutional count.

Concept: Urban local government became a constitutional subject only in 1992. Before that, municipalities existed entirely at the pleasure of State legislatures, which could supersede a municipal body or postpone its elections indefinitely, and many did. The Constitution (Seventy-fourth Amendment) Act, 1992 changed that by inserting Part IX-A and the Twelfth Schedule, in force from 1 June 1993, and its companion, the Seventy-third Amendment, did the same for Panchayats in Part IX and the Eleventh Schedule from 24 April 1993. Part IX-A carries a small number of provisions worth knowing as a block. Article 243Q creates the three types of Municipality — Nagar Panchayat for a transitional area, Municipal Council for a smaller urban area, Municipal Corporation for a larger urban area — and leaves the classification of any given area to the Governor by public notification. Article 243R deals with composition and direct election of the seats filled by election from territorial constituencies called wards. Article 243S provides for Ward Committees in municipalities with a population of three lakh or more. Article 243T reserves seats for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to population and reserves not less than one-third of all seats, and of the offices of chairperson, for women. Article 243U fixes a five-year term and requires elections before its expiry, or within six months of a dissolution. Article 243W allows the State legislature to endow Municipalities with the powers needed to function as institutions of self-government, with reference to the eighteen subjects of the Twelfth Schedule. Articles 243Y and 243ZA place a State Finance Commission and a State Election Commission in the picture, and Article 243ZD provides for a District Planning Committee. The number in this question is the smallest fact in that structure, but it is the entry point to all of it.

State PCS 2021 Q81 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

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