Who determines remuneration of the Advocate General for the State ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4), Governor. The office is created by Article 165 of the Constitution, and clause (3) of that Article settles this question in a single sentence: the Advocate-General holds office during the pleasure of the Governor and receives such remuneration as the Governor may determine. Everything about the office runs through the Governor. Clause (1) provides that the Governor of each State shall appoint a person qualified to be a judge of a High Court to be Advocate-General for the State. Clause (2) provides that it is the Advocate-General's duty to advise the Government of the State on such legal matters and to perform such other duties of a legal character as the Governor from time to time refers or assigns to him, besides discharging the functions conferred on him by the Constitution or any other law. Clause (3) then fixes both his tenure and his pay in the Governor's hands. Note what the Constitution deliberately does not do: it does not fix a term for the office, it does not prescribe a procedure or grounds for removal, and it does not lay down a scale of remuneration. All three are left to the Governor, which in practice means to the State government whose advice the Governor acts upon. That is a design choice worth registering, because it distinguishes this office from those whose salaries Parliament or a State legislature must fix by law and whose holders can be removed only by a prescribed process.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Parliament has no part in the affairs of a State's Advocate-General. It does fix salaries by law for several other constitutional functionaries — those of the judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts, and of the Comptroller and Auditor-General, are determined by Parliament and charged on the Consolidated Fund — and it is that pattern which makes this option superficially plausible. But the Advocate-General is a State office created by Article 165 and placed wholly under the Governor. Confusing 'a salary that Parliament fixes by law' with 'a salary that an executive authority determines' is the underlying error, and the two categories are worth keeping apart across the whole polity syllabus.  (b) This is the trap the question is built around, because the President does exactly this job for the corresponding office at the Centre. The Attorney-General of India is appointed by the President under Article 76, holds office during the pleasure of the President, and receives such remuneration as the President may determine. Substitute Governor for President and State for Union and you have Article 165. A candidate who has learnt the Attorney-General's provisions and then assumes the President appoints and pays the Advocate-General as well has mapped the wrong authority onto the right structure — which is precisely the error UPSC set as a false statement in 2009.  (c) The State legislature does not determine the Advocate-General's remuneration, and Article 165(3) leaves no room for it to do so. What the legislature does have is a connection of a different kind: under Article 177 the Advocate-General has the right to speak in, and to take part in the proceedings of, both Houses of the State legislature and any committee of which he is named a member, though he has no right to vote. He also enjoys the privileges and immunities of a member. That right of audience makes the legislature feel like the natural home of the office and is what makes this option attractive; a right to speak in a House is not a power in that House to fix pay.

Concept: The Advocate-General is the highest law officer in a State, the exact counterpart of the Attorney-General of India at the Union level, and the two offices should be learnt as a matched pair. The Governor appoints him, and the only qualification the Constitution prescribes is that he must be a person qualified to be appointed a judge of a High Court — which in turn requires that he be a citizen of India and have held a judicial office in the territory of India for ten years, or have been an advocate of a High Court for ten years. His duties are to advise the State government on legal matters referred to him by the Governor, to perform such other duties of a legal character as the Governor assigns, and to discharge the functions conferred on him by the Constitution or by any law. He holds office during the pleasure of the Governor and is paid what the Governor determines. Because the Constitution prescribes neither a term nor a removal procedure, the tenure is in substance political: an Advocate-General conventionally resigns when the government that recommended him leaves office.

State PCS 2026 Q73 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q73 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer