LLM Group 1 Constitutional and Administrative Law Public Authorities and Power Holders 2015 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: both notes, each worth about twelve and a half marks by the paper's own arithmetic, and each written as a compressed essay rather than as a list. For (a), where a committee gets the power to compel anybody to do anything, the committees that matter, how an inquiry proceeds, one worked case and the limits. For (b), the fact that the agency rests on no statute of its own, its origin and divisions, the consent problem under section 6, the two cases that define its autonomy, and an honest word on its record.

a) Inquiries by Legislative Committees

A legislative committee inquiry is an examination, conducted by a body of members on behalf of the House, into the conduct of the administration, the spending of public money or the conduct of members themselves. It is neither a trial nor a Commission of Inquiry under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952, and its power to summon officials and call for files therefore has to be traced to the Constitution.

The committees that conduct inquiries fall into four groups. The financial committees: the Public Accounts Committee, constituted every year under Rule 308 of the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in Lok Sabha, of twenty-two members, fifteen from the House of the People and seven from the Council of States, with the Chairman appointed from the Opposition by practice since 1967, which examines the audit reports laid under Article 151 and the Appropriation and Finance Accounts; the Estimates Committee of thirty members of the House of the People, which examines the estimates and suggests economies; and the Committee on Public Undertakings, which examines the accounts and audit reports of public undertakings.

The Departmentally Related Standing Committees, twenty-four of them in their present form since 1993, each attached to a group of ministries, examining demands for grants, Bills referred to them and annual reports. The scrutiny committees, chiefly the Committee on Subordinate Legislation, the Committee on Government Assurances and the Committee on Petitions. And the committees on conduct, the Committee of Privileges and the Ethics Committee, together with ad hoc Joint Parliamentary Committees appointed for a particular scandal, of which the committees on the securities and banking irregularities of 1992 and on stock market transactions in 2001 are the standard examples.

Raja Ram Pal v. Hon'ble Speaker, Lok Sabha, (2007) 3 SCC 184, is the case to cite. In December 2005 a television investigation showed eleven Members of Parliament accepting money for asking questions in the House. An inquiry committee of the Lok Sabha and the Ethics Committee of the Council of States examined the matter and, on their reports, the members were expelled. They challenged the expulsion, contending that the House had no power to expel and that its procedure was unfair. The Supreme Court held that the power to expel is among the privileges continued by Article 105(3); that Article 122(1) bars judicial review only on the ground of irregularity of procedure and not where illegality or unconstitutionality is alleged; and, having examined the committees' procedure and found that the members had notice and a hearing, upheld the expulsions. The case establishes three things at once: a committee inquiry into members' conduct is competent, it must observe natural justice, and its result is reviewable on narrow grounds.

b) C.B.I., that is, the Central Bureau of Investigation

The Central Bureau of Investigation is the Union's principal investigating agency for corruption, economic offences and serious crime, and the first thing to say about it is that no statute establishes it. It was created by a resolution of the Ministry of Home Affairs dated 1 April 1963, which reorganised the Delhi Special Police Establishment. That establishment began in 1941 to investigate bribery and corruption in war-time supplies and was given a statutory footing by the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946. The agency exercises the powers of that establishment, and its officers are in law police officers of the Union territory of Delhi. The Gauhati High Court once held its constitution invalid for want of a statute; that decision was stayed by the Supreme Court and the matter remains pending, so the position is unsettled and should be stated as such.

Jurisdiction is its central legal difficulty. Under section 2 of the Act of 1946 the establishment's powers extend to the Union territories; under section 5 the Central Government may extend them to a State; but section 6 provides that no such extension operates in a State without the consent of that State Government. Consent may be general or case by case. By 2024 ten States had withdrawn general consent, including Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Kerala, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Punjab, Rajasthan, Telangana, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka withdrew in September 2024. A constitutional court may still direct the agency to investigate notwithstanding the absence of consent, which is why a large share of its most important work now comes by judicial direction.

That protection has since been altered by Parliament: the Delhi Special Police Establishment (Amendment) Act, 2021 allows the two year tenure to be extended by one year at a time, up to five years in all, on the recommendation of the same committee, and in Dr. Jaya Thakur v. Union of India, decided on 11 July 2023, the Supreme Court upheld that Act and the parallel Central Vigilance Commission (Amendment) Act, 2021, while quashing the particular extensions granted to the incumbent Director of Enforcement. An extendable tenure is a weaker guarantee than a fixed one, because it leaves the holder looking to the authority that grants the extension.

Parliament has since built the gate a third time, and an answer that stops at 2023 is out of date. Section 17A of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, inserted by the amending Act of 2018 with effect from 26 July 2018, forbids a police officer from conducting any enquiry, inquiry or investigation into an offence under that Act alleged against a public servant, where the alleged offence relates to a recommendation made or a decision taken by him in the discharge of his official functions, without the previous approval of the appropriate authority. In one respect it is wider than section 6A, because it protects every public servant and not only officers of the rank of Joint Secretary and above.

Its record, stated honestly. The agency has investigated the largest corruption matters of the last three decades, from the hawala diaries and the fodder scam to spectrum, coal and a series of bank frauds, much of it under court monitoring. Against that, its conviction rate in Prevention of Corruption Act cases is modest relative to the number of trials pending; it depends on the Government for officers, sanction and facilities; and its reach in the States now follows the political map. The Supreme Court's description of it in 2013 as a caged parrot has endured because it names the structural point rather than a passing failure.