Which of the following committees contains representatives of both the Houses of the Parliament ?
(a) Committee on Welfare of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes
(b) Committee on Empowerment of Wome

Question

Which of the following committees contains representatives of both the Houses of the Parliament ?
(a) Committee on Welfare of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes
(b) Committee on Empowerment of Women
(c) Business Advisory Committee
(d) Committee on Privileges
(e) Estimates Committee

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (b) 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.  (c) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2022 Q62 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q62 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer