LLM Foundation Course Indian Constitutional Law New Challenges 2025-26 - Group III Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: the text of Article 12 and why it is inclusive; the four named limbs; the long march of "other authorities", with each leading case given its facts, its issue and its ratio rather than a bare citation; the retreat in Zee Telefilms and Federal Bank; whether the judiciary is State; and the honest answer to the question asked, which is that the ambit has been expanded in doctrine and narrowed in fact by privatisation, with Article 226 and Kaushal Kishor filling part of the gap.

1. The provision, and why its drafting decides everything

Article 12 provides that in Part III, unless the context otherwise requires, "the State" includes the Government and Parliament of India, the Government and the Legislature of each of the States, all local authorities, and other authorities within the territory of India or under the control of the Government of India.

Three features of that drafting control the whole subject.

Why the definition matters at all. Part III is, in its ordinary working, a set of vertical guarantees held by the citizen against the State. Article 13(2) provides that the State shall not make any law taking away or abridging the rights conferred by Part III, and any law made in contravention is void to the extent of the contravention. Article 32 gives the remedy, and the right to move the Supreme Court under it is itself a fundamental right. So the question whether a body is State decides whether the citizen has any constitutional remedy against it at all. Article 12 is the doorway to the whole of Part III, and every argument about its width is really an argument about how much of national life is subject to the discipline of the fundamental rights.

"All local authorities" takes its meaning from section 3(31) of the General Clauses Act, 1897, which defines a local authority as a municipal committee, district board, body of port commissioners or other authority legally entitled to, or entrusted by the Government with, the control or management of a municipal or local fund. On that footing municipal corporations, panchayats, improvement trusts, port trusts and cantonment boards are State, and so are the bodies that administer a local fund under statutory authority. The leading application is Mohammad Yasin v. Town Area Committee (AIR 1952 SC 115), where a fee imposed by a town area committee was struck down as violating Article 19(1)(g), the Court proceeding on the footing that the committee was State.

"Other authorities" is the residual limb, and it is where seventy years of litigation has taken place.

3. "Other authorities": the cases, each with its facts and its ratio

(a) University of Madras v. Shantha Bai (AIR 1954 Mad 67): the narrow start.

(b) Rajasthan State Electricity Board v. Mohan Lal (AIR 1967 SC 1857): the statutory test.

Facts. Employees of the erstwhile Jaipur State transferred to the Rajasthan State Electricity Board, a body constituted under the Electricity (Supply) Act, 1948, complained that the Board had denied them promotion in violation of Articles 14 and 16.

Issue. Is a statutory corporation carrying on commercial activity an "other authority"?

Held. Yes. Bhargava J., for the majority, held that "other authorities" includes every authority created by the Constitution or by a statute on which powers are conferred by law; that the rule of ejusdem generis has no application because the preceding words share no common genus; and that it is immaterial that the body also carries on a commercial activity, since a body may perform commercial functions and still exercise statutory powers of a governmental character. Shah J., concurring, put it differently and importantly: the test is whether the body has been invested with power to make rules or regulations having the force of law, or with authority to issue binding directions the disobedience of which is punishable.

Ratio. Statutory creation plus the conferment of legal powers makes a body State, whatever its commercial character.

The reasoning that mattered most came in Mathew J.'s concurring opinion, which supplied the idea on which the next thirty years were built. The State's functions have expanded far beyond the traditional police functions; it acts through corporations because the corporate form is administratively convenient; a public corporation is therefore an agency or instrumentality of the State; and the State cannot be permitted to escape its constitutional obligations by the simple expedient of clothing itself in a corporate form. He added the criterion of the public function: where a corporation is an instrument of State policy, performing a function the State itself would otherwise perform, it must be subject to the same constitutional limitations as the State.

(d) Ramana Dayaram Shetty v. International Airport Authority of India (1979) 3 SCC 489: the tests, and the parallel rule on State largesse.

Facts. The International Airport Authority invited tenders for a restaurant and snack bar at Bombay airport, restricting eligibility to persons who were "registered second class hoteliers having at least five years' experience". It then accepted a tender from a party which did not satisfy that condition at all. Shetty, whose tender had been rejected, challenged the acceptance.

On the second question, and this is the half of the case that is often forgotten, the Court held that the State and its instrumentalities cannot act arbitrarily in the matter of largesse. Where the State prescribes a standard for the award of a contract, it is bound by it and may not depart from it in an individual case, because Article 14 forbids arbitrariness in every State action, contractual or otherwise. That holding was the foundation of the whole modern law of government contracts.

(e) Ajay Hasia v. Khalid Mujib Sehravardi (1981) 1 SCC 722: form ceases to matter.

Facts. Admission to the Regional Engineering College, Srinagar, was challenged on the ground that the oral interview carried a disproportionate one-third of the total marks and had been conducted arbitrarily. The College was run not by a statutory corporation but by a society registered under the Jammu and Kashmir Registration of Societies Act, 1898, corresponding to the Societies Registration Act, 1860.

Issue. Can a registered society, a creature of contract between its members rather than of statute, be State?

(f) The intermediate applications. Som Prakash Rekhi v. Union of India (1981) 1 SCC 449 applied the tests to a government company under the Companies Act, Bharat Petroleum, holding it State because the whole shareholding, the transferred undertaking and the pervasive control were present. P.K. Ramachandra Iyer v. Union of India (1984) 2 SCC 141 applied them to the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. Tekraj Vasandi v. Union of India (1988) 1 SCC 236 shows the tests excluding as well as including: the Institute of Constitutional and Parliamentary Studies, a registered society doing research, was held not to be State because government funding was partial, control was not pervasive and its work was not a governmental function. Chander Mohan Khanna v. NCERT (1991) 4 SCC 578 held the National Council of Educational Research and Training not to be State on the facts, its funding being largely from its own sales and its autonomy substantial.

(g) Pradeep Kumar Biswas v. Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (2002) 5 SCC 111: the settled test.

Three riders, each examinable. One, control which is merely regulatory, whether under statute or otherwise, will not make a body State: every insurer, bank, airline and telecom operator is heavily regulated and none is thereby a limb of the State. Two, the Ajay Hasia indicia are not a rigid formula; they are indicia to be applied cumulatively. Three, the enquiry is one of substance and not of form, so the label attached to a body, its mode of incorporation and the nomenclature of its funding do not decide it.

On the facts the Court found that CSIR was formed by a government resolution, that its funding came almost entirely from the government, that the Prime Minister was its ex officio President, that the Government could review and reverse its decisions and could dissolve it and take its assets, and that its objects were of national importance and governmental in character.

4. Where the widening stopped

(a) Zee Telefilms Ltd. v. Union of India (2005) 4 SCC 649.

Facts. The Board of Control for Cricket in India terminated Zee's television rights contract. Zee moved the Supreme Court under Article 32, which required it to establish that the Board is State.

(b) Federal Bank Ltd. v. Sagar Thomas (2003) 10 SCC 733. A private bank, licensed and closely regulated by the Reserve Bank of India under the Banking Regulation Act, 1949, was held not to be State. The Court's reasoning is the cleanest statement of the regulatory-control rider: regulation, however detailed, is the State performing its own function of supervision, and it does not convert the regulated body into a limb of the State.

(c) K.K. Saksena v. International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (2015) 4 SCC 670 completed the picture from the other side, holding that a body may be amenable to Article 226 in respect of a public duty without being State for Article 12, and warning that the duty must be genuinely public and not merely a duty owed to members of the public under a contract.

5. Is the judiciary "State"?

In its rule-making and administrative capacity, yes: rules framed under Articles 145 and 227, and administrative decisions on appointments and service conditions, are State action and are open to challenge under Part III. Prem Chand Garg v. Excise Commissioner (AIR 1963 SC 996) struck down a rule of the Supreme Court requiring security for costs in an Article 32 petition, because it whittled down a fundamental right.

Alongside it the courts opened a second door, which is not Article 12 at all. Andi Mukta Sadguru Shree Muktajee Vandas Swami Suvarna Jayanti Mahotsav Smarak Trust v. V.R. Rudani (1989) 2 SCC 691 held that a writ of mandamus under Article 226 lies against any person or body performing a public duty, whatever its constitutional character, because the words "for any other purpose" in Article 226 are wider than Article 32. There a trust running an affiliated college was compelled to pay its teachers, the duty being public though the body was private.

And a third door has now been opened. In Kaushal Kishor v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2023) 4 SCC 1, a bench of five held by 4:1 that the rights under Articles 19 and 21 are enforceable even against persons other than the State and its instrumentalities, joining Articles 15(2), 17, 20(2), 23, 24 and 29(2), which are horizontal on their own terms; and that the State owes a positive duty to protect a person's Article 21 rights even against a threat from a private actor. Nagarathna J. partly dissented, and the remedial framework remains undeveloped, but the direction is clear.

The same shrinkage happens in three other forms. Public private partnership: an airport, a port, a highway or a hospital operated under a concession performs a public function with State assets and is privately owned, so no test of pervasive control catches it. Outsourcing: when a department contracts out a service, the contractor's employees are outside Article 16 and the users are outside Article 14 as against the contractor. The regulated private monopoly: a distribution licensee may be the only supplier of electricity in a city, and after Federal Bank regulation is not control.