UPPSC 2022 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 46 of 150

Correct — D, A-2, B-1, C-4, D-3. All four pairings are settled constitutional text and none is disputed. The THIRD Schedule sets out the Forms of Oath or Affirmation — the words a Union or State minister, a member of Parliament or a State legislature, a judge of the Supreme Court or a High Court, and the Comptroller and Auditor-General must swear on taking office (A-2). The FOURTH Schedule allocates the seats in the Council of States, listing how many Rajya Sabha members each State and Union Territory returns (B-1). The SEVENTH Schedule carries the three legislative lists — the Union List, the State List and the Concurrent List — which distribute the subject matter of law-making between Parliament and the State legislatures under Article 246 (C-4). And the EIGHTH Schedule contains the languages recognised by the Constitution, now twenty-two of them, referred to in Articles 344(1) and 351 (D-3). Note that the Third and Fourth Schedules are the pair candidates most often invert, and that the question puts them side by side deliberately.

• (a)A-3, B-4, C-2, D-1 — Every pair is wrong. It makes the Third Schedule the languages schedule, the Fourth the legislative lists, the Seventh the forms of oath and the Eighth the Rajya Sabha seat allocation. The Seventh Schedule pairing is the giveaway: the Seventh is the longest schedule in the Constitution, running to roughly two hundred and ten entries across its three lists, and could not be a page of oath formulae.
• (b)A-1, B-2, C-3, D-4 — The unshuffled 1-2-3-4 code that a guessing candidate falls back on, and it fails on all four. It inverts the genuinely confusable pair — giving the Rajya Sabha seat allocation to the Third Schedule and the forms of oath to the Fourth — and then hands the legislative lists to the Eighth Schedule and languages to the Seventh, exactly reversing the two best-known schedules in the Constitution.
• (c)A-4, B-3, C-1, D-2 — Wrong at every position: the Third Schedule is given the legislative lists, the Fourth the languages, the Seventh the Rajya Sabha seat allocation and the Eighth the forms of oath. It is the mirror image of the correct code, and it can be struck out the moment you are certain of any single pair — knowing only that the Seventh Schedule holds the Union, State and Concurrent Lists is enough.

The Constitution originally had eight Schedules and now has twelve. They are not an appendix of odds and ends: each holds material that had to be part of the Constitution but was too long, too technical or too likely to change to sit comfortably in the Articles. The full sequence is worth learning as a block — First: the States and Union Territories and their territories; Second: salaries, allowances and emoluments of the President, Governors, Speakers, judges and the CAG; Third: forms of oath or affirmation; Fourth: allocation of seats in the Council of States; Fifth: administration and control of Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes; Sixth: administration of tribal areas in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram; Seventh: the Union, State and Concurrent Lists; Eighth: the recognised languages; Ninth: Acts and Regulations validated against judicial review under Article 31B, added by the First Amendment in 1951; Tenth: disqualification on the ground of defection, added by the Fifty-second Amendment in 1985; Eleventh: twenty-nine subjects for panchayats, added by the Seventy-third Amendment in 1992; Twelfth: eighteen subjects for municipalities, added by the Seventy-fourth Amendment in 1992.

Match-lists on the Schedules are pure recall, so the only question is how to make the recall cheap. Two devices help. First, learn the Schedules in their numbered order rather than as isolated facts, because the examiner always draws four from the sequence and a gap in the middle is immediately visible. Second, know which pairs are deliberately set against each other. The Third and Fourth are the classic confusion — oath versus Rajya Sabha seats — and this question places them at A and B for exactly that reason; UPSC has asked what the Fourth Schedule contains at least twice, in 2001 and again word for word in 2004, and UPPSC has set the Fourth-versus-Second confusion too. Once the Seventh and Eighth are secure, and they are the two most famous schedules, the four-pair code collapses to a two-way decision at the top.

• Third Schedule — Forms of Oath or Affirmation for ministers, legislators, judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts, and the Comptroller and Auditor-General.
• Fourth Schedule — allocation of seats in the Council of States (Rajya Sabha) to each State and Union Territory. Uttar Pradesh has the largest allocation at 31 seats.
• Seventh Schedule — the Union List, State List and Concurrent List, distributing legislative subject matter between Parliament and the State legislatures under Article 246.
• Eighth Schedule — the languages recognised by the Constitution, referred to in Articles 344(1) and 351; the number rose from 14 to 22, the last four (Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santali) added by the Ninety-second Amendment Act, 2003.
• The Constitution began with eight Schedules; the Ninth (First Amendment, 1951), Tenth (Fifty-second Amendment, 1985), Eleventh and Twelfth (Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth Amendments, 1992) brought the total to twelve.

• Swapping the Third and Fourth Schedules. Oaths come before Rajya Sabha seats in the numbering — Third is oaths, Fourth is seats — and UPSC and UPPSC have both built questions on candidates getting this the wrong way round.
• Confusing the Second Schedule with the Fourth. The Second deals with salaries and emoluments of high constitutional office-holders; UPPSC's 2019 paper set a mismatched pair placing the Council of States allocation in the Second Schedule.
• Mixing the Eleventh and Twelfth Schedules and their item counts — 29 panchayat subjects in the Eleventh under the 73rd Amendment, 18 municipal subjects in the Twelfth under the 74th.

The Schedules are a permanent fixture on both papers. UPPSC prefers the match-list and the 'which pair is NOT correctly matched' formats and has run them repeatedly — Schedule-to-subject pairs in 2023, a Seventh-to-Tenth Schedule match-list in 2025, and Eighth Schedule language questions in 2025. UPSC more often asks a single Schedule in isolation, and it repeats itself: the question 'which statement correctly describes the Fourth Schedule' appeared in 2001 and again word for word in 2004.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which Schedule of the Constitution of India was added by the Fifty-second Amendment Act, 1985 ?

  • (a)Ninth Schedule
  • (b)Tenth Schedule
  • (c)Eleventh Schedule
  • (d)Twelfth Schedule

  Answer(b) Tenth Schedule — the Fifty-second Amendment inserted it to carry the anti-defection provisions. The Ninth came with the First Amendment in 1951, and the Eleventh and Twelfth with the Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth Amendments in 1992.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The number of languages in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution rose from eighteen to twenty-two by which Amendment ?

  • (a)Seventy-first Amendment Act, 1992
  • (b)Eighty-sixth Amendment Act, 2002
  • (c)Ninety-second Amendment Act, 2003
  • (d)Ninety-seventh Amendment Act, 2011

  Answer(c) Ninety-second Amendment Act, 2003 — it added Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santali. The Seventy-first Amendment of 1992 had earlier added Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali, taking the count from 15 to 18.