With reference to Prime Minister's Office (PMO) which one of the statements is/are correct ?
1. It came into existence in 1977.
2. It is headed by the Cabinet Secretary.
Select the correct answer from

Question

With reference to Prime Minister's Office (PMO) which one of the statements is/are correct ?
1. It came into existence in 1977.
2. It is headed by the Cabinet Secretary.
Select the correct answer from the codes given below :
Codes :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Only 1. Statement 1 is correct: the body was called the Prime Minister's Secretariat from independence until 1977, when it was renamed the Prime Minister's Office during Morarji Desai's premiership. So the PMO under that name dates from 1977, which is exactly what the statement claims; the staff machinery behind it, of course, is older, going back to the Prime Minister's Secretariat of 1947. Statement 2 is wrong, and it is the whole point of the question. The PMO is headed by the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, not by the Cabinet Secretary. The two officers sit at the top of two different, deliberately separate structures: the Principal Secretary runs the Prime Minister's personal and political-executive support machinery inside the PMO, while the Cabinet Secretary heads the Cabinet Secretariat, which serves the Council of Ministers as a whole — preparing the agenda for Cabinet meetings, providing secretarial assistance to Cabinet Committees, recording decisions and coordinating between Ministries. The Cabinet Secretary is the senior-most civil servant of the Union and ex officio Chairman of the Civil Services Board, but the office he heads is the Cabinet Secretariat, not the PMO. One statement true, one false, so the code is (c).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This picks the one false statement and drops the true one. The PMO is headed by the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister; the Cabinet Secretary heads a different institution, the Cabinet Secretariat, which works for the Council of Ministers rather than for the Prime Minister personally.  (b) Statement 1 is right but statement 2 is not. Accepting both means collapsing the PMO and the Cabinet Secretariat into one office — precisely the confusion the examiner is testing. They are separate secretariats with separate heads.  (d) Statement 1 is correct. The Prime Minister's Secretariat was renamed the Prime Minister's Office in 1977, so the PMO as such does date from that year; rejecting both statements throws away a fact the question gets right.

Concept: The apex of the Union executive is served by two distinct secretariats. The Prime Minister's Office is the Prime Minister's own support machinery — it handles his correspondence, briefs him on every Ministry's work, services his public engagements and international commitments, and carries whatever policy weight the incumbent Prime Minister chooses to give it; it is headed by the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister. The Cabinet Secretariat serves the Council of Ministers collectively and is headed by the Cabinet Secretary. Neither body is named in the Constitution: both are creatures of executive organisation, operating under the rules of business framed under Article 77(3), which lets the President make rules for the more convenient transaction of the Government's business and for its allocation among Ministers. Their influence therefore rises and falls with practice and personality rather than with any constitutional text.

State PCS 2019 Q145 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q145 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer