With reference to Municipalities, which of the following statements is/are correct ?
1. The eligible age to be a member of municipality is 25 years.
2. One-third of the total number of seats to be fil

Question

With reference to Municipalities, which of the following statements is/are correct ?
1. The eligible age to be a member of municipality is 25 years.
2. One-third of the total number of seats to be filled by direct election in the municipalities is reserved for women.
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Only 2. Read the printed options before you commit, because this booklet has shuffled them: 'Both 1 and 2' sits at (a), where a candidate expects 'Only 1', and 'Only 1' has been pushed down to (d). Statement 1 is incorrect. The eligible age to be a member of a municipality is twenty-one, not twenty-five. Article 243V borrows the qualification from the State Legislature — for which the minimum age is twenty-five — and then immediately carves it back with a proviso: 'no person shall be disqualified on the ground that he is less than twenty-five years of age, if he has attained the age of twenty-one years.' The drafting is roundabout, but its effect is plain, and Part IX does exactly the same thing for Panchayats. Statement 2 is correct, and correct almost word for word. Article 243T(3) provides that 'not less than one-third (including the number of seats reserved for women belonging to the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes) of the total number of seats to be filled by direct election in every Municipality shall be reserved for women', with the seats allotted by rotation to different constituencies. Two things in that clause repay attention: the reservation attaches only to seats filled by DIRECT election, and the one-third is inclusive of SC and ST women rather than additional to them. So statement 1 falls on its number, statement 2 stands on the text, and the option that reads 'Only 2' on this paper is (b).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Accepts the age of twenty-five, which is the qualifying age for a State Legislative Assembly, not for a municipality. This is the natural error, because Article 243V does begin by importing the State Legislature's qualifications wholesale — and if you stop reading at that point, twenty-five looks right. The proviso that follows is the operative part, and it exists precisely so that local self-government can draw on younger people than the Assembly does. This option is doubly dangerous on this booklet because it occupies the position where many candidates expect to find 'Only 1'.  (c) Rejects statement 2, and statement 2 is a near-quotation of Article 243T(3). Candidates sometimes doubt it because they know that several states have legislated fifty per cent reservation for women in their urban and rural local bodies, and conclude that one-third must be out of date. It is not: the Constitution sets a floor of not less than one-third, and a state raising it by its own law does not repeal the constitutional minimum. 'Not less than' is the phrase that reconciles the two.  (d) The exact inversion of the truth — it keeps the false statement and discards the true one. It is also where 'Only 1' has been placed in this booklet rather than at (a), so it will catch two different candidates: one who genuinely believes the age is twenty-five, and one who has correctly concluded that only statement 2 is right and then marks by remembered position. On the merits, twenty-one is the age fixed by the proviso to Article 243V, and the one-third women's reservation in Article 243T(3) is beyond argument.

Concept: Part IX-A of the Constitution, inserted by the 74th Amendment Act of 1992 and in force from 1 June 1993, gave urban local government the same constitutional footing that the 73rd Amendment gave Panchayats. It creates three kinds of urban body under Article 243Q — a Nagar Panchayat for an area in transition from rural to urban, a Municipal Council for a smaller urban area and a Municipal Corporation for a larger one — fixes a five-year term, requires elections to be held before that term expires or within six months of a dissolution, vests superintendence of those elections in a State Election Commission, and provides for a State Finance Commission to review the sharing of resources. Within that framework Article 243T governs reservation of seats and Article 243V governs disqualifications, including the age at which a person may be chosen.

State PCS 2025 Q150 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q150 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer