Which one of the following pairs is NOT correctly matched ?
State – Members in the Legislative Assembly

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Manipur – 62. The Manipur Legislative Assembly has 60 elected members, not 62, so this is the one pair on the list that does not hold. The figure matters because 60 is not an arbitrary number: Article 170(1) says a State Legislative Assembly shall consist of not more than five hundred and not less than sixty members chosen by direct election from territorial constituencies. Manipur sits exactly on that constitutional floor, which is why the printed '62' is easy to plant and easy to miss — it is only two off, and it looks like the sort of odd number a real assembly might have. Learn Manipur as the '60 = the floor itself' case and the distractor stops working. The other three pairs in this question are all accurate as of the June-2022 exam and remain accurate today.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Correctly matched, so it is not the answer. Goa's Assembly has 40 seats. It is one of the small States that sit BELOW Article 170's floor of sixty — Sikkim and Mizoram are the others — which is possible only because Parliament made special provision for them in the Acts that created or reorganised those States. A candidate who half-remembers 'the minimum is 60' may wrongly flag Goa as the odd pair; the exception is exactly what makes Goa a favourite in these lists.  (b) Correctly matched, so it is not the answer. Uttarakhand's elected strength has been 70 since the State was carved out of Uttar Pradesh in November 2000. The number is sometimes misquoted as 71, because the Assembly historically also had one nominated Anglo-Indian member alongside the 70 elected seats; that nomination was discontinued nationally by the 104th Constitutional Amendment, in force from 25 January 2020. The pair asks for members of the Legislative Assembly, and 70 is the elected strength.  (d) Correctly matched, so it is not the answer. Uttar Pradesh has the largest Legislative Assembly in India at 403 elected seats, and has had that strength since the 2000 bifurcation that created Uttarakhand; before that it stood at 425. Anyone carrying the older 425 figure will misread this pair as the wrong one — which is precisely why the paper included it.

Concept: Article 170 of the Constitution governs the composition of a State Legislative Assembly: its members are chosen by direct election from territorial constituencies, and its strength must lie between sixty and five hundred. Within that band each State's actual number is fixed by law and adjusted by delimitation, so it is a fact to be learnt State by State rather than derived. A handful of small States — Goa, Sikkim and Mizoram — have Assemblies smaller than sixty, permitted by the special provisions Parliament wrote into the statutes creating or reorganising them. Article 170 also requires that seats be allotted to constituencies so that the ratio of population to seats is, so far as practicable, the same throughout the State.

State PCS 2022 Q71 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q71 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer