Match the Amendments with their year of implementation :
A. 42nd Amendment
B. 52nd Amendment
C. 86th Amendment
D. 96th Amendment
1. 1985
2. 2011
3. 1976
4. 2002
Select the correct answer from the code

Question

Match the Amendments with their year of implementation :
A. 42nd Amendment
B. 52nd Amendment
C. 86th Amendment
D. 96th Amendment
1. 1985
2. 2011
3. 1976
4. 2002
Select the correct answer from the codes given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, A-3, B-1, C-4, D-2, i.e. 42nd → 1976, 52nd → 1985, 86th → 2002, 96th → 2011. Take them one at a time. The Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976 is the Emergency-era 'Mini-Constitution': it added Socialist, Secular and Integrity to the Preamble, created Part IVA with the Fundamental Duties in Article 51A, inserted Articles 39A, 43A and 48A, and moved Education, Forests, Weights and Measures, Protection of wild animals and birds, and Administration of justice from the State List to the Concurrent List. It received assent on 18 December 1976, so A pairs with 3. The Constitution (Fifty-second Amendment) Act, 1985 is the anti-defection amendment: it added the Tenth Schedule and amended Articles 101, 102, 190 and 191 so that a legislator who defects loses his seat. It received assent on 15 February 1985, so B pairs with 1. The Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002 inserted Article 21A, making free and compulsory education for children aged six to fourteen a Fundamental Right, recast Article 45 as early-childhood care and education for children below six, and added the parental duty in Article 51A(k); assent came on 12 December 2002, so C pairs with 4. The Constitution (Ninety-sixth Amendment) Act, 2011 is the smallest of the four — it substituted 'Odia' for 'Oriya' in the Eighth Schedule, correcting the name of Odisha's language, and received assent on 23 September 2011, so D pairs with 2. Only option (d) carries all four pairs. One honest caution about the wording. The question says 'year of implementation', but the years on offer are the years of the Acts themselves, and for two of these four the Act and its actual commencement fall in different years: the bulk of the 42nd Amendment came into force on 3 January 1977, and Article 21A of the 86th Amendment was notified into force only on 1 April 2010, the day the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 commenced. Answer with the year printed in the Act's short title, which is what the codes are built on, and keep the commencement dates as a separate piece of knowledge.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Only one of its four pairs survives. B-1 is right — the 52nd Amendment is indeed of 1985 — but A-2 dates the 42nd Amendment to 2011, C-3 dates the 86th to 1976 and D-4 dates the 96th to 2002. This is the option built for a candidate who remembers the anti-defection year and then guesses. Anchoring the 42nd Amendment to the Emergency (1975–77) is enough on its own to kill it.  (b) Every pair is wrong. It puts the 42nd Amendment in 2002, the 52nd in 1976, the 86th in 2011 and the 96th in 1985 — in effect the correct sequence read backwards. The giveaway is 96th → 1985: amendment numbers rise monotonically with time, so a ninety-sixth amendment cannot predate an eighty-sixth.  (c) All four pairs are wrong. It dates the 42nd Amendment to 1985, the 52nd to 2011, the 86th to 1976 and the 96th to 2002. Here too the chronology test settles it instantly: this option makes the 86th Amendment (1976) older than the 52nd (2011), which is impossible for consecutively numbered amendments.

Concept: Constitutional amendments in India are numbered strictly in the order Parliament passes them, so the number itself is a rough clock: the 1st is 1951, the 42nd is 1976, the 52nd is 1985, the 73rd and 74th are 1992, the 86th is 2002, the 96th is 2011, the 101st is 2016 and the 106th is 2023. Matching questions of this kind are therefore solvable even from partial memory, because any option that puts a higher-numbered amendment before a lower-numbered one is automatically out. What still has to be learned by heart is the content of the landmark amendments and the year attached to each.

State PCS 2024 Q127 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q127 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer