Which of the following statement/s is/are incorrect ?
(a) B.N. Rau was advisor of the Constituent Assembly.
(b) B.N. Rau prepared draft Constitution in October, 1947.
(c) A draft Constitution prepared

Question

Which of the following statement/s is/are incorrect ?
(a) B.N. Rau was advisor of the Constituent Assembly.
(b) B.N. Rau prepared draft Constitution in October, 1947.
(c) A draft Constitution prepared by B.N. Rau contained 310 Articles and 8 Schedules.
(d) A draft Constitution prepared by B.N. Rau contained 243 Articles and 13 Schedules.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4), 'Only (c)'. The stem asks for the INCORRECT statement, with 'incorrect' printed in bold, and exactly one of the four fails. Statement (a) is true: Sir Benegal Narsing Rau was appointed Constitutional Adviser to the Constituent Assembly in July 1946, and it was in that capacity, not as a member of the Drafting Committee, that he did his work. Statement (b) is true: he prepared the first draft of the Constitution in October 1947, after studying the constitutions of many countries and consulting jurists abroad. Statement (d) is true: that draft ran to 243 articles and 13 schedules — the Parliament's own digital library holds the document under the title 'First Draft of the Constitution of India and Schedules (As Prepared by the Constitutional Adviser Shri B N Rau), October 1947'. Statement (c) therefore fails, because it attributes to the same document a different and wrong count of 310 articles and 8 schedules. Notice how the question is actually built, because the architecture does half the work. Statements (c) and (d) are mutually contradictory descriptions of one document, so exactly one of them must be false. That means the answer must contain either (c) or (d) — and since (a) and (b) are both plainly true, options (1) and (2), each of which condemns one of them, are dead on arrival. The whole question then reduces to a single fact: which pair of numbers belongs to Rau's draft. It is 243 and 13, so the incorrect statement is (c) and the answer is option (4).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option is right about (c) but wrong about (a), and one bad limb sinks it. Statement (a) accurately describes Rau's role: he was the Constitutional Adviser to the Constituent Assembly, appointed in July 1946, a full-time official position distinct from membership of any committee. The word 'advisor' in the statement is exactly the office he held, so there is nothing in it to reject. A candidate reaches this option by feeling that Rau's association with the Assembly is somehow overstated — perhaps because the drafting of the Constitution is popularly associated with Dr B.R. Ambedkar and the Drafting Committee — and then looking for an option that discounts statement (a).  (b) Again correct on (c) and wrong on (b). October 1947 is the right date for Rau's draft, and the document is catalogued under that month. The confusion this option feeds on is the sequence of the two drafts. Rau's draft came first, in October 1947; the Drafting Committee, chaired by Dr Ambedkar and constituted in August 1947, worked on it and published the Draft Constitution of India in February 1948. A candidate who remembers only 'February 1948' as the date of 'the draft Constitution' will read statement (b) as wrong. It is not: it is about a different document, prepared by a different person, four months earlier.  (c) This is the mirror image of the correct answer and the only genuinely dangerous option in the set, because it survives every structural elimination and fails only on the numbers. It asserts that 243 articles and 13 schedules is the wrong description of Rau's draft, which would leave 310 articles and 8 schedules as the right one. It is the other way round: 243 and 13 are the figures for Rau's October 1947 draft. The '8 Schedules' in statement (c) is a borrowed number — the Constitution as adopted on 26 November 1949 had 395 articles and 8 schedules — and lifting a true figure from a different document into a false statement is the standard way this kind of distractor is manufactured.

Concept: The Constitution passed through several hands and several documents, and questions of this type are really testing whether a candidate can keep them apart. B.N. Rau was appointed Constitutional Adviser to the Constituent Assembly in July 1946. He studied the constitutions of a large number of countries and travelled abroad to consult constitutional lawyers and judges, and in October 1947 he produced the first draft of the Constitution — 243 articles and 13 schedules — built largely by assembling and reconciling the reports of the Assembly's various committees. The Drafting Committee, constituted on 29 August 1947 under the chairmanship of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, then worked on that material and published the Draft Constitution of India in February 1948. That draft was debated clause by clause, amended over hundreds of sittings, and the Constitution as finally adopted on 26 November 1949 contained a Preamble, 395 articles and 8 schedules. So: Rau drafted, the Drafting Committee redrafted, the Assembly adopted — three stages, three documents, three sets of numbers.

State PCS 2026 Q75 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q75 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer