The National Commission to review the working of the Constitution has recommended that for effectuating fundamental duties are _________.
(a) Duty to vote at elections
(b) To pay taxes
(c) Duty of ind

Question

The National Commission to review the working of the Constitution has recommended that for effectuating fundamental duties are _________.
(a) Duty to vote at elections
(b) To pay taxes
(c) Duty of industrial organisations to provide education to children of their employees
(d) To foster a spirit of family values and responsible parenthood in the matter of education, physical and moral well-being of children

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1), 'Only (a), (b)'. The decisive words are in the stem, not in the statements. The National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution — set up on 22 February 2000 under the chairmanship of Justice M.N. Venkatachaliah, a former Chief Justice of India, and reporting in 2002 — dealt with Fundamental Duties in a recommendation that opens with the exact phrase the paper uses: 'For effectuating Fundamental Duties, the following steps should be taken.' Under that head the Commission set out a short list of measures — sensitising citizens and creating general awareness of the duties along the lines proposed by the Justice Verma Committee; jealously guarding the right to freedom of religion and the rights of minorities; reforming the whole process of education and freeing it from governmental and political control; and, as its fourth limb, that the 'duty to vote at elections, actively participate in the democratic process of governance and to pay taxes should be included in article 51A'. That fourth limb is the source of statements (a) and (b), and it is the only new duty proposed under the 'effectuating' head. Hence option (1). Honesty requires one further note, because a well-read candidate will have hesitated here. The propositions in statements (c) and (d) are also genuine NCRWC proposals — they appear in the Commission's report as a separate, following recommendation, worded 'The following should also be incorporated as fundamental duties in article 51A', covering the fostering of family values and responsible parenthood and the duty of industrial organisations to educate the children of their employees. They are real, but they sit outside the 'for effectuating Fundamental Duties' head that this stem quotes, and the Commission's final answer key is option (1). Note too that the English stem is ungrammatical as printed — 'has recommended that for effectuating fundamental duties are ____' — which makes the pointer phrase easy to skim past.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This option selects the two propositions that lie outside the head the stem names. Both are genuine NCRWC proposals, which is why the option is not absurd — but they were made under the Commission's separate recommendation that further duties 'should also be incorporated as fundamental duties in article 51A', not under the recommendation on steps for effectuating the existing duties. The option is therefore the exact complement of the keyed answer: it takes everything the stem excludes and rejects everything it points to. A candidate who remembers the family-values and industrial-organisation proposals but not the voting-and-taxes limb will land here.  (c) This option admits the duty to vote but drops the duty to pay taxes, which is odd because the two travel together in a single sentence of the Commission's report: 'Duty to vote at elections, actively participate in the democratic process of governance and to pay taxes should be included in article 51A.' There is no version of the recommendation in which voting is proposed and tax-paying is not. The option then adds the two proposals from the separate recommendation. Splitting a phrase that the source keeps whole is a common way of building a distractor, and the defence against it is to remember recommendations as sentences rather than as bullet points.  (d) 'All of the above' is offered eleven times in this paper. It is right only when every listed item can be positively shown to satisfy the stem, and wrong as soon as one cannot. Here the stem is narrow: it asks what the Commission recommended FOR EFFECTUATING fundamental duties, and only statements (a) and (b) fall under that head. Statements (c) and (d) belong to the Commission's separate recommendation for additional duties. The lesson is about reading the stem's qualifier rather than the statements' plausibility — all four propositions are things the Commission said, but the question does not ask what the Commission said, it asks what the Commission recommended under one specific head.

Concept: Fundamental Duties are contained in Part IVA of the Constitution, which consists of a single article, Article 51A. They were not in the original Constitution: they were inserted by the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976, on the recommendation of the Swaran Singh Committee constituted in that year. The Committee had suggested eight duties; the amendment incorporated ten. An eleventh was added by the Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002 — the duty of a parent or guardian to provide opportunities for education to his child or ward between the ages of six and fourteen years, inserted alongside the new fundamental right to education. Like the Directive Principles, the Fundamental Duties are non-justiciable: no court can enforce them and no legal sanction attaches to their breach directly. The Swaran Singh Committee had in fact proposed that Parliament be allowed to impose penalties for non-compliance, but that proposal was not accepted, and the duties remain moral and civic obligations given constitutional form.

State PCS 2026 Q77 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q77 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer