Find the correct statements regarding Inter-State Council.
(a) It is mentioned in the article 263.
(b) The President is empowered to establish it.
(c) The President of India has never exercised this p

Question

Find the correct statements regarding Inter-State Council.
(a) It is mentioned in the article 263.
(b) The President is empowered to establish it.
(c) The President of India has never exercised this power and has not so far established any such Inter-State Council under power of article 263.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), '(a), (b)'. Statements (a) and (b) both come straight from the constitutional text; statement (c) is contradicted by events. Article 263 provides that if at any time it appears to the President that the public interest would be served by the establishment of a Council charged with the duty of inquiring into and advising upon disputes which may have arisen between States, or of investigating and discussing subjects in which some or all of the States, or the Union and one or more States, have a common interest, or of making recommendations upon any such subject and in particular for the better coordination of policy and action, it shall be LAWFUL FOR THE PRESIDENT BY ORDER to establish such a Council and to define its duties, its organisation and its procedure. That single sentence establishes statement (a) — the Council is provided for in Article 263 — and statement (b) — the power to establish it rests with the President, exercised by order rather than by legislation. Statement (c) asserts that the power has never been used. It has. The Sarkaria Commission on Centre-State Relations, which reported in the late 1980s, recommended a permanent Inter-State Council under Article 263, and the Council was duly constituted by a Presidential Order in 1990. It is chaired by the Prime Minister and includes the Chief Ministers of all States, the Chief Ministers of Union Territories having a Legislative Assembly, the Administrators of Union Territories without one, the Governors of States under President's rule, and six Central Cabinet Ministers including the Home Minister, nominated by the Prime Minister. Two statements standing and one falling gives option (2).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option admits all three statements, and so requires statement (c) — the claim that the President has never exercised the power — to be true. It is not: the Inter-State Council was established by Presidential Order in 1990 on the Sarkaria Commission's recommendation, and Article 263 had in fact been used earlier still, to set up bodies such as the Central Council of Health and the Central Council of Local Government. Statement (c) also carries a warning of its own construction: it is an absolute, using 'never' and 'not so far'. An absolute is falsified by a single counter-example, which makes it the cheapest kind of statement to test and the riskiest kind to accept.  (c) This option keeps the false statement (c) and discards the true statement (a), which is the least contestable proposition in the set — the Inter-State Council is expressly the subject of Article 263, and nothing turns on interpretation. The combination is also internally odd: it accepts that the President is empowered to establish the Council, which is a proposition drawn from Article 263, while denying that the Council is mentioned in Article 263. An option that relies on one half of a provision and rejects the other half should not survive a second look.  (d) Here the true statement (b) is discarded and the false statement (c) retained. Statement (b) is the operative half of Article 263: the Article does not itself create a Council, it authorises the President to create one by order and to define its duties, organisation and procedure. That design is deliberate — it lets the machinery of Centre-State consultation be shaped and reshaped by executive order as circumstances require, without a constitutional amendment or an Act of Parliament. Rejecting statement (b) usually reflects an assumption that a constitutional body must be created by legislation, which is exactly what Article 263 does not require.

Concept: Article 263 sits in the part of the Constitution dealing with relations between the Union and the States, and it provides machinery for consultation rather than adjudication. The Council it authorises has three possible charges: to inquire into and advise upon disputes that have arisen between States; to investigate and discuss subjects in which some or all States, or the Union and one or more States, have a common interest; and to make recommendations on such subjects, particularly for the better coordination of policy and action. Two features of the design are worth noting. First, the Council is created by Presidential ORDER, not by statute, and the same order defines its duties, organisation and procedure — so its shape can be altered without amending the Constitution or passing a law. Second, its function is recommendatory throughout. It advises on inter-State disputes; it does not decide them. Adjudication of inter-State water disputes, for instance, belongs to tribunals constituted under Article 262 and the Inter-State River Water Disputes Act, 1956, which is a different Article and a different mechanism altogether.

State PCS 2026 Q80 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q80 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer