When was the National Commission for Women established in India ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), 1992. Parliament passed the National Commission for Women Act in 1990 — the Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 22 May 1990 and received the President's assent on 30 August 1990 — but an Act receiving assent and a body being constituted under it are two different events, and this question turns on the second one. The National Commission for Women itself, as a functioning statutory body with a Chairperson, five Members and a Member-Secretary as provided under Section 3 of the Act, was first constituted on 31 January 1992, with Jayanti Patnaik as its first Chairperson. The Commission's mandate, laid out in the Act, is to review the constitutional and legal safeguards available to women, recommend remedial legislative measures, facilitate redressal of grievances, and advise the Government on all policy matters affecting women. It is a statutory body, not a constitutional one — it exists because Parliament created it by ordinary law, not because the Constitution itself provides for it — and that statutory character is why its date of establishment is anchored to the Act's commencement and the Commission's actual constitution rather than to any constitutional provision.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 1990 is the year Parliament passed the National Commission for Women Act — the Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 22 May 1990 and received presidential assent on 30 August 1990 — but the Commission itself was not constituted that year. A candidate who read 'the NCW Act is a 1990 Act' and stopped there, without registering that the body took until 1992 to actually stand up, lands here.  (b) No National Commission for Women event is dated to 1991. This option carries no documented significance for the Commission and functions purely as a numerical decoy sitting between the Act's passage in 1990 and the Commission's actual constitution in 1992.  (d) 1993 belongs to a different, easily confused national body: the National Human Rights Commission, set up under the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993. Both are statutory rights bodies created within a few years of each other, both review legal safeguards and handle grievances, and that structural similarity is exactly why a candidate who has the two commissions' founding years transposed picks this option.

Concept: The National Commission for Women is a statutory body — created by an Act of Parliament, not by the Constitution — established to safeguard the constitutional and legal rights of women in India. Its founding has two distinct dates that this question is built to separate: the National Commission for Women Act, 1990 (Bill introduced 22 May 1990, presidential assent 30 August 1990) supplied the legal framework, and the Commission itself was first constituted, with its Chairperson and Members in place, on 31 January 1992. Jayanti Patnaik was its first Chairperson.

State PCS 2025 Q81 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q81 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer