LLM Group 1 Constitutional and Administrative Law Administrative Process Nature and Scope 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: the question asks how, so the answer must be a causal account and not a description of the present. Show the administrative process as it was before 1991, the crisis and the policy decision, then the transformation in four dimensions, the instrument of control, the institution that exercises it, the form of State participation, and the sanction; give the legal developments in each dimension with dates; then the judicial decisions, which fall into two groups, those that permitted the withdrawal and those that set the constitutional limits on how it may be done; and end with the honest qualification, which is that what happened was not deregulation but re-regulation by a different instrument, and that the newest developments prove it.

The transformation, dimension by dimension

Dimension one: the instrument changed from permission to rule. The New Industrial Policy of 24 July 1991 abolished industrial licensing except for a short reserved list, removed MRTP approval for expansion, and opened most sectors to foreign investment. FERA was replaced by the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999, which reverses the default so that transactions are free unless regulated, and the change of a single word in the title, from Regulation to Management, is the most economical summary of the whole transformation available. The MRTP Act gave way to the Competition Act, 2002, which regulates conduct and combinations rather than size.

Dimension two: the institution changed from ministry to regulator. The Securities and Exchange Board of India became statutory in 1992, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India in 1997, the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission in 1998, the insurance regulator in 1999, the Competition Commission in 2003 with substantive enforcement from 2009, the petroleum regulator in 2006, and the real estate and insolvency regulators in 2016. Each is a body that makes regulations, investigates and adjudicates, at arm's length from the department.

The judicial decisions

Group one: the decisions that permitted the withdrawal. Delhi Science Forum v. Union of India, (1996) 2 SCC 405 upheld the opening of telecommunications to private operators, holding that the choice of economic policy is for the government. BALCO Employees' Union v. Union of India, (2002) 2 SCC 333 held that the decision to disinvest is a matter of economic policy in which the court will not interfere in the absence of illegality or violation of a statute or fundamental right, and that no employee has a right to be heard on it. Vivek Narayan Sharma v. Union of India, (2023) 3 SCC 1 shows the same posture in monetary policy, upholding demonetisation by four to one.

Group three: the decisions about who counts as the State once it has withdrawn. Pradeep Kumar Biswas v. Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, (2002) 5 SCC 111, a bench of seven, requires financial, functional and administrative domination for a body to be State under Article 12, excluding merely regulatory control. Zee Telefilms Ltd. v. Union of India, (2005) 4 SCC 649 held the Board of Control for Cricket in India not to be State despite its monopoly, while allowing a writ under Article 226 for the discharge of a public duty. The practical result is that the constitutional standard has migrated from Article 12 to the public function jurisdiction, and further, after Kaushal Kishor v. State of Uttar Pradesh, (2023) 4 SCC 1, to the horizontal enforcement of Articles 19 and 21 against private persons.

The qualification: this was re-regulation, not deregulation

The State did not withdraw; it changed instrument, and the evidence is that regulation has grown in the same period. The number of regulators has increased steadily since 1992. Sectors that were opened have been re-regulated in detail, telecommunications and electricity most obviously. Entirely new regulatory subjects have been created, most recently by the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, whose Rules were notified on 13 November 2025, which imposes duties on every entity processing personal data, including the State. And the compliance burden that Jan Vishwas addresses is the burden created by that growth.

The honest description is therefore that liberalisation replaced discretionary permission with published rules, which is a large improvement for administrative law even where it is not a reduction in the quantity of regulation. A rule can be read, challenged as ultra vires or manifestly arbitrary, and applied uniformly; a permission decided in an officer's discretion cannot.

2012, the constitutional limit on how a public resource may be given away. Centre for Public Interest Litigation v. Union of India, (2012) 3 SCC 1 cancelled 122 licences allotted on a first-come-first-served basis, holding the method arbitrary. The advisory opinion in Natural Resources Allocation, In re Special Reference No. 1 of 2012, (2012) 10 SCC 1 then corrected the over-reading, holding that auction is not the only constitutionally permissible method and that the test is whether the method serves the common good and is not arbitrary.

2016 to 2019, the discipline of the regulator itself. Cellular Operators Association of India v. TRAI, (2016) 7 SCC 703 struck down a regulation compelling operators to compensate subscribers for call drops as manifestly arbitrary and unreasonable, holding a regulator's regulations to be subordinate legislation testable on that ground. Competition Commission of India v. Bharti Airtel Ltd., (2019) 2 SCC 521 held that where the sectoral regulator and the competition regulator both have jurisdiction, the sectoral regulator's findings on the technical questions come first.

Conclusion. Globalisation and liberalisation transformed the Indian administrative process by changing four things and leaving one thing untouched. The instrument moved from prior permission to published rule, the institution from ministry to independent regulator, the State's role from producer to shareholder and referee, and the sanction from imprisonment to civil penalty, the last of these still in progress through the Jan Vishwas legislation and the Deregulation Commission announced in February 2025. What did not change is the constitutional standard, and that is the point on which the answer should end. Ramana Dayaram Shetty, the 2G decision and the natural resources reference together hold that the State may choose its economic policy and may not choose to be arbitrary in carrying it out; Pradeep Kumar Biswas and Zee Telefilms ensure that public power does not escape scrutiny merely by changing its legal clothing; and Clariant, Cellular Operators and Bharti Airtel subject the new regulators to the same discipline of reasons and non-arbitrariness that once applied to the licensing officer. Deregulation in India has therefore been a change in the technique of control and not a retreat of public law.