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

Two constitutional provisions supply it. Article 105, and Article 194 for the States, states the powers, privileges and immunities of each House, its members and of its committees. Article 105(3) provides that those privileges shall be such as Parliament may define by law and, until it does, those that obtained immediately before the coming into force of section 15 of the Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1978, which preserved the position under which the privileges were those of the House of Commons at the commencement of the Constitution. Parliament has never enacted the defining law. The privilege that matters is the power to send for persons, papers and records, and its sanction is the House's power to punish for contempt. Article 118, and Article 208 for the States, empowers each House to make rules regulating its procedure, and it is under those Rules that the committees themselves exist.

How an inquiry proceeds. The committee decides its subject within its allotted field, calls for written memoranda from the ministry, examines the ministry's Secretary and other officials orally, and may call non-official witnesses and experts. It sits in private, its evidence is confidential until presented, and it deliberates and reports across party lines, which is why its reports are often unanimous on matters that divide the House. The report is presented to the House and, in the case of the financial committees, the ministries must furnish Action Taken Notes on the recommendations.

The limits. Article 121, and Article 211 for the States, forbids any discussion of the conduct of a Judge of the Supreme Court or a High Court except on a motion for removal, so a committee cannot inquire into a judge's judicial conduct. By convention committees examine officials and not Ministers, so the person collectively responsible to the House under Article 75(3) does not himself appear. The Government may withhold documents on grounds of security or confidentiality, and there is no arbiter between it and the committee. And the reports recommend; nothing compels acceptance, and Action Taken Notes are often overdue.

Its work divides into three. The Anti-Corruption Division investigates offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, by central government servants and employees of central public sector undertakings and public sector banks, and it is over this division that the Central Vigilance Commission exercises superintendence under section 8(1)(b) of the Central Vigilance Commission Act, 2003. The Economic Offences Division investigates large frauds, bank frauds and cases with a cross-border dimension, and the agency is India's National Central Bureau for Interpol. The Special Crimes Division takes up serious conventional crime, chiefly at the request of a State or on the direction of a constitutional court.

Vineet Narain v. Union of India, (1998) 1 SCC 226, decided on 18 December 1997, is the foundation of the modern law on this agency. The Jain hawala diaries, seized in 1991, recorded payments to politicians and civil servants, and for years nothing was done. On a public interest petition by a journalist the Supreme Court held that the failure was structural. It struck down the single directive, an executive instruction requiring prior sanction before officers above a certain rank could even be investigated; directed a minimum tenure of two years for the Director and a transparent selection process; and placed the agency's anti-corruption work under the superintendence of a Central Vigilance Commission that was to be given statutory status. It also used the technique of continuing mandamus, retaining the petition and supervising compliance.

Subramanian Swamy v. Director, CBI, (2014) 8 SCC 682, decided on 6 May 2014, completed that work. After Vineet Narain, Parliament had re-enacted the single directive as section 6A of the Act of 1946, requiring the Central Government's prior approval before any inquiry into an officer of the rank of Joint Secretary and above. A Constitution Bench of five judges struck it down as violating Article 14: the classification protected the senior officer from central investigation while the State police could investigate him without approval, and a provision that impedes the prosecution of high-level corruption offends the rule of law, which is itself part of Article 14. In CBI v. Dr. R.R. Kishore, decided on 11 September 2023, a Constitution Bench clarified that the invalidity operates from the date section 6A was inserted in 2003 and not merely from 2014.

Its constitutional validity is now unresolved, and this is the most current point in the subject. In Centre for Public Interest Litigation v. Union of India, 2026 INSC 55, decided on 13 January 2026, a Bench of two judges divided. Viswanathan J. upheld section 17A as a protection for honest officers against vexatious complaints that would otherwise paralyse administration, while observing that the power to approve ought to rest with the Lokpal or a Lokayukta rather than with the Government. Nagarathna J. held it unconstitutional under Article 14, on the reasoning of Subramanian Swamy, as an impermissible classification shielding officers engaged in decision making while leaving others unprotected. The matter has been referred to the Chief Justice of India for a larger Bench, so the correct statement is that the approval requirement stands and its constitutionality is undecided.

Conclusion. The two institutions in this question are the two halves of a single problem. A legislative committee has independence, cross-party composition and the House's inherited privilege to send for persons, papers and records, and it cannot compel anyone to act on what it finds. The Central Bureau of Investigation can arrest, charge and prosecute, and it rests on a resolution of 1963 and an Act of 1946 written for another purpose, needs a State's consent under section 6 that eleven States have withdrawn, and is staffed and funded by the executive whose conduct it examines. Raja Ram Pal shows how far a committee's power reaches and that it is reviewable; Vineet Narain and Subramanian Swamy show the courts steadily removing the executive's power to stop an investigation before it starts. Neither line of authority has yet produced an institution that combines credible independence with the capacity to compel.

Its three objects are worth stating at the outset. To keep the executive within the law and within the mandate given to it; to ensure that money is raised and spent only as authorised; and to bring administrative failure into the open so that it can be corrected. It is a control of authorisation, scrutiny and consequence, and it was never intended to be a control of daily administration.

First: control over the existence of the Government

A motion of no confidence needs no grounds and, if carried, ends the Government. It is admitted on the support of fifty members. A censure motion must state its grounds and may be aimed at one Minister; an adjournment motion sets aside the day's listed business to discuss a definite matter of urgent public importance and carries an implicit reproach; the discussion on the motion of thanks on the President's address is the annual occasion for a general attack.

The illustration is that Governments in India have in fact fallen on the floor of the House, which is what keeps the instrument real. The threat is present in every session even though the motion succeeds rarely.

Third: control over the purse

This is the oldest branch and it is entirely constitutional. No tax may be levied or collected except by authority of law, Article 265. No money may be withdrawn from the Consolidated Fund except under appropriation made by law, Article 114(3). The annual financial statement must be laid before both Houses, Article 112, and estimates other than charged expenditure are submitted as demands for grants, Article 113. Money Bills may originate only in the House of the People, Articles 109 and 110, and Article 115 requires the Government to return to the House for supplementary, additional or excess grants.

The instruments during the budget are the cut motions. A disapproval of policy cut reduces the demand to one rupee and challenges the policy itself; an economy cut proposes a stated reduction; a token cut of one hundred rupees ventilates a specific grievance.

The illustrations are the Joint Parliamentary Committees. The committee on the securities and banking irregularities of 1992 examined the securities scam and its report was followed by regulatory legislation and by the strengthening of the securities regulator; the committee on stock market transactions in 2001 did the same after the next collapse. Where a committee has examined a Bill in detail, the Bill has frequently emerged materially altered, which is control of a kind the floor cannot supply.

Fifth: control over delegated legislation

Parliament delegates because it must, and the control of that delegated power is a distinct branch. Statutes ordinarily require rules to be laid before Parliament, often subject to modification or annulment within a stated number of sitting days, and the Committee on Subordinate Legislation examines whether a rule is within the power conferred, conforms to the general object of the Act, imposes unexpected expenditure or operates retrospectively.

Krishna Kumar Singh v. State of Bihar, (2017) 3 SCC 1, decided on 2 January 2017 by seven judges, is the most important recent case on legislative control and should be given in full. Between 1989 and 1992 Bihar took over some four hundred and twenty-nine Sanskrit schools by ordinance and then re-promulgated the ordinance at least seven times without once placing it before the Legislature; teachers claimed to have become government servants. The Court held that re-promulgation without placing the ordinance before the legislature is a fraud on the Constitution and a subversion of the democratic legislative process; that the satisfaction of the President or Governor is open to judicial review; and that a lapsed ordinance does not create enduring rights except where irreversible consequences require relief.

The requirement of laying is mandatory precisely because it is the means by which the legislature recovers its monopoly of law-making. The decision turns a formality into an enforceable control and names the abuse, government by successive ordinance, that had made Article 123 an escape from control rather than an instance of it.

The seven-judge Bench unanimously overruled P.V. Narasimha Rao, holding that bribery forms no part of legislative activity, that Articles 105(2) and 194(2) protect what is necessary for the free functioning of the House and not criminal conduct that corrupts it, and that the offence is complete on acceptance of the gratification whether or not the vote is cast as agreed. The anomaly that the more brazen the bargain the greater the immunity has gone, and a House whose members are themselves answerable to the ordinary criminal law is in a stronger position to demand answers from the executive.

What has weakened the control

The powers are intact and their use has thinned. The number of sitting days has fallen well below the averages of the early decades. A substantial proportion of Bills is now passed without reference to a standing committee, some after very short debate. The guillotine disposes of most demands for grants. Question hour is frequently lost to disorder. And the Tenth Schedule, whatever its justification, means that a member who votes against the party whip risks disqualification, which limits the House's ability to divide against its own Government.

The recent cases cut both ways: Krishna Kumar Singh and Sita Soren strengthen accountability, while the unresolved money Bill question and the routine use of the guillotine show how easily the forms can be satisfied without the substance. The controls are limited far less by any absence of power than by the unwillingness of a majority to use them against a Government it exists to support.

Its present form is the direct product of a judicial mandamus. In Vineet Narain v. Union of India, (1998) 1 SCC 226, decided on 18 December 1997, the Supreme Court considered the total inaction of the investigating agencies on the Jain hawala diaries, which recorded payments to politicians and officials. It held the failure to be structural: an agency that investigates the executive cannot be left under the executive's unmediated control. It directed that the Commission be given statutory status; that the Central Vigilance Commissioner be selected by a committee of the Prime Minister, the Home Minister and the Leader of the Opposition; that the Commission have superintendence over the Central Bureau of Investigation in anti-corruption work; and that the Director of that agency have a minimum tenure.

It struck down the single directive requiring prior sanction to investigate senior officers, and it retained the case under a continuing mandamus. Parliament then enacted the Central Vigilance Commission Act, 2003.

The role: the statutory functions

The functions in section 8(1) fall into four kinds and should be given in that order.

Superintendence over departmental vigilance and advice. It supervises the vigilance administration of the ministries and of central public sector bodies, and tenders advice on vigilance matters, first stage advice on how a complaint should be handled and second stage advice on the penalty after inquiry.

The Commission works through the Chief Vigilance Officers, one in every ministry, department, public sector undertaking and public sector bank, appointed with the Commission's concurrence, who screen complaints, conduct preliminary inquiries and advise the disciplinary authority.

Sections 11 to 14 supply the machinery: the powers of a civil court while inquiring, compulsory consultation on vigilance rules, and an annual report to the President which is laid before both Houses together with a memorandum stating the action taken and the reasons for not accepting any recommendation. The Commission is also the designated agency to receive public interest disclosures under the Public Interest Disclosure and Protection of Informers Resolution, 2004, the Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2014, having never been brought into force, and the Central Vigilance Commissioner chairs the committee that recommends senior appointments in the Central Bureau of Investigation under section 4A of the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946.

Centre for Public Interest Litigation v. Union of India, (2011) 4 SCC 1, shows those provisions being enforced. In September 2010 the Government appointed P.J. Thomas as Central Vigilance Commissioner although a charge sheet in the Palmolein import case had been pending against him since 1999; the Leader of the Opposition, one of the three members of the committee, dissented and the Government proceeded on the majority. The Supreme Court held the recommendation to be non est and quashed the appointment. Its reasoning is the doctrine of institutional integrity: the committee's duty is not confined to satisfying itself of the candidate's personal integrity but extends to whether the appointment leaves the institution able to perform the function Parliament gave it, and a Commissioner facing a corruption charge cannot credibly supervise corruption investigations. It is the only occasion on which an appointment to this office has been set aside, and it is the strongest single answer to the suggestion that the appointment safeguard is decorative.

Is the Commission strong enough? The assessment

The honest answer is no, and it should be argued under specific heads rather than asserted.

Third, it cannot prosecute. It has no prosecution wing of the kind section 12 of the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013, gave the Lokpal, and no power to sanction prosecution of the kind section 23 of that Act confers. It reviews the progress of sanction applications; it cannot grant sanction.

Fourth, it depends on the officers of the very organisations it supervises. The Chief Vigilance Officer is the Commission's arm inside a ministry or undertaking, and he is a serving officer of that ministry or undertaking, whose career lies there. This is what makes a headquarters of a few hundred able to supervise the whole central administration, and it is also the structural reason the system is soft on seniors.

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.

Sixth, the office has repeatedly been run in an acting capacity, which weakens the very guarantees the Act relies on. By an order under section 10(1) of the Act, A.S. Rajeev, a Vigilance Commissioner, was authorised to act as Central Vigilance Commissioner in the vacancy arising on 3 August 2026 on the completion of the tenure of Praveen Kumar Srivastava, until a Commissioner is appointed. The Act secures independence by a fixed, non-renewable term, judicially protected removal and a selection committee containing the Leader of the Opposition. An institution led on authorisation rather than on appointment does not enjoy that protection in the same measure, and delay in filling the office is a form of control that requires no amendment of the statute.

Conclusion. The Commission's role is to inquire into corruption by central public servants, to exercise superintendence and direction over the Central Bureau of Investigation in investigations under the Prevention of Corruption Act, to review those investigations and the sanctions pending for prosecution, to supervise departmental vigilance through the Chief Vigilance Officers and to advise. The Act of 2003 gives it real independence: a plural body, appointment on the recommendation of a committee containing the Leader of the Opposition, a fixed non-renewable term and removal only on a finding of the Supreme Court, and Centre for Public Interest Litigation shows that those provisions will be enforced. It is nevertheless not strong enough for the function this question describes.

Its advice binds nobody, its jurisdiction stops at the central government and stops short of maladministration altogether, it can neither prosecute nor sanction prosecution, it works through officers of the bodies it supervises, its superintendence over the investigating agency ends where that agency's Director's tenure begins, and the office itself has been left to be discharged in an acting capacity. It is a well designed advisory body asked to do the work of an enforcement authority, and the gap between the two is not a failure of the Commission but a choice made by the statute.

Origin, and the missing statute

The Central Bureau of Investigation was established by a resolution of the Ministry of Home Affairs dated 1 April 1963. It was not created by Parliament, and no Act bears its name. Its powers are those of the Delhi Special Police Establishment, a body set up in 1941 to investigate bribery and corruption in war-time supplies and placed on a statutory footing by the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946. The resolution of 1963 reorganised that establishment, gave it a wider charter and a new name, and the agency has functioned under that arrangement ever since. Its officers are, in law, police officers of the Union territory of Delhi whose powers have been extended.

This has been litigated and it is unresolved. The Gauhati High Court held in 2013 that the agency was not validly constituted for want of a statute; the Supreme Court stayed that judgment and the appeal remains pending. A candidate should state the position as unsettled rather than assert either view, and should note the practical consequence: an agency of national importance operates on an administrative resolution and a seventy-nine year old Act enacted for a different purpose, and a parliamentary committee examining it has recommended that it be given its own law.

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.

Its role divides into three divisions and it is best explained that way. The Anti-Corruption Division investigates offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, by central government servants, employees of central public sector undertakings and public sector banks, and by others involved with them; over this work the Central Vigilance Commission has superintendence under section 8(1)(b) of the Act of 2003. The Economic Offences Division investigates serious financial crime, bank fraud, import and export fraud, fake currency and cases with a cross-border element, and the agency is India's National Central Bureau for Interpol, which makes it the channel for extradition requests and international letters of request.

The consequence is that the agency's reach in the States now varies with the politics of the State. Two things keep it operative. First, a constitutional court may direct the agency to investigate notwithstanding the absence of consent, and a great deal of its most important work now arrives that way. Second, cases already registered before withdrawal are unaffected, and the agency has argued that consent is not required where the offence and the accused are within its Union jurisdiction.

How a case actually travels

Substantiating the functioning means showing the route a case takes, and the obstacles at each stage. Source information or a complaint comes in, often through a Chief Vigilance Officer or the Commission; a preliminary enquiry is registered, which is not an investigation under the Code and has no coercive power; if the material justifies it a regular case is registered by first information report; investigation follows, including searches, seizures and questioning; on completion, a report is filed under section 173 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, now the corresponding provision of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, either as a charge sheet or as a closure report.

The cases that define its autonomy

Vineet Narain v. Union of India, (1998) 1 SCC 226, decided on 18 December 1997. Diaries seized from the Jain brothers in 1991 recorded large payments to politicians and civil servants; for years the agency did nothing. On a journalist's public interest petition the Supreme Court held that the inertia was structural rather than accidental. It struck down the single directive, the executive instruction requiring prior sanction before officers above a certain rank could even be inquired into; directed a minimum tenure of two years for the Director and a transparent appointment; and subjected the agency's anti-corruption work to the superintendence of a statutory Central Vigilance Commission. It also developed continuing mandamus, keeping the petition alive to supervise compliance, which is the technique by which most later court-monitored investigations have been conducted.

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.

Common Cause v. Union of India, (2019) 3 SCC 1. On the night of 23 and 24 October 2018, in the course of a public quarrel between the Director and the Special Director, the Central Vigilance Commission and the Government divested the Director, Alok Kumar Verma, of his functions and appointed an interim Director. The Supreme Court set the orders aside, holding that the protection in section 4B(2), which forbids transfer of the Director without the previous consent of the selection committee, cannot be defeated by an order that strips him of every function while leaving him in office, because the two year tenure exists to insulate the office from the executive. The case is authority for the proposition that the agency's independence is now a statutory right of the office and not merely a convention.

The fodder scam in Bihar, investigated on the direction of the High Court from 1996, is the counter-example: it ran through multiple trials over more than two decades and ended in the conviction and imprisonment of a former Chief Minister, which shows that the agency can carry a political case to conviction when the investigation is court-monitored and the documentary trail is complete.

The second generation spectrum matter followed the audit report of 2010 and the judgment in Centre for Public Interest Litigation v. Union of India, (2012) 3 SCC 1, which quashed 122 licences on 2 February 2012. The agency's prosecution ended in the acquittal of all the accused in December 2017, and appeals against that acquittal have been before the Delhi High Court since. It is the leading illustration of the gap between an audit finding, a constitutional adjudication and a criminal conviction.

The coal block allocations followed the audit report of 2012 and Manohar Lal Sharma v. Principal Secretary, (2014) 9 SCC 516, in which the Court on 25 August 2014 held all allocations between 1993 and 2010 to be illegal and arbitrary and by its order of 24 September 2014 cancelled two hundred and fourteen of them. The agency's investigations produced a number of convictions of officials and company officers, a better record than in the spectrum cases.

Conclusion. The role of the Central Bureau of Investigation is to investigate corruption by central public servants, serious economic crime and, on request or direction, grave conventional crime, and to act as India's channel to Interpol. Its functioning is substantiated by a body of law built almost entirely by the Supreme Court: Vineet Narain removed the executive's power to stop an inquiry before it began and gave the Director a tenure; Subramanian Swamy struck down the statutory revival of that power under Article 14, and R.R. Kishore made the invalidity run from 2003; Common Cause held that the Director's tenure cannot be defeated by divesting him of his functions; and State of West Bengal has left open, on a maintainable suit under Article 131, the question whether the agency may act in a State that has withdrawn consent.

The examples show the same pattern from the other side: the hawala diaries produced reform without convictions, the fodder scam convictions after two decades, the spectrum prosecution an acquittal after the constitutional adjudication had gone the other way, and the coal allocations a mixture of both. What the agency lacks is not capacity but a statute of its own, a jurisdiction that does not depend on political consent, and independence in the two places where cases are actually lost, the sanction to prosecute and the tenure of the officers who investigate.

What a judicial inquiry is

In this subject a judicial inquiry means an inquiry into a definite matter of public importance conducted by a sitting or retired judge, ordinarily as a Commission of Inquiry appointed under section 3 of the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952. The name is misleading and the misconception should be cleared at the outset. The inquiry is not judicial in the sense of exercising judicial power. It is an executive fact-finding exercise conducted by a judicial person. It tries nobody, convicts nobody, decides no rights and imposes no liability. What makes it judicial is the identity and the method of the person conducting it, not the character of what he does.

Three things must be distinguished from it. A criminal trial, which determines guilt on proof beyond reasonable doubt under the rules of evidence. A departmental inquiry, which determines an employee's liability to a penalty under service rules. And an internal or administrative inquiry by officials, which is not conducted under the Act at all and carries none of its powers.

Section 5, additional powers. Where the notification so declares, the Commission may require any person to furnish information; may enter any building or place where it has reason to believe books or documents relating to the subject matter may be found, and seize them or take extracts; and may have any person examined. Section 5(4) applies certain provisions relating to search and seizure. Section 5A allows the Commission to use the services of any officer or investigation agency of the Central or a State Government for the purpose of conducting a preliminary inquiry.

Section 6, the protection of witnesses. No statement made by a person in the course of giving evidence before the Commission shall subject him to, or be used against him in, any civil or criminal proceeding, except a prosecution for giving false evidence, provided the statement was made in answer to a question the Commission required him to answer. This is what makes candour possible, and it is also, as will appear, a large part of why inquiries produce no prosecutions.

Section 3(4), the report. The appropriate Government shall cause the report of the Commission, together with a memorandum of the action taken thereon, to be laid before the House within a period of six months of the submission of the report. This is the only accountability provision in the Act, and it requires a memorandum, not reasons.

Why a judge, and what it adds

The subject matter of these inquiries is almost always the conduct of government, of the police or of persons close to power, and the appointing authority is the Government itself. A judge brings four things: a demonstrated independence from the executive; long practice in testing evidence and examining witnesses; familiarity with the requirements of a fair hearing, which section 8B makes central; and a public standing that makes the report hard to dismiss without giving reasons.

What it does not add is legal force. A judge conducting an inquiry has exactly the powers the Act gives, and no more. He cannot punish, order recovery or direct a prosecution. Nothing in the Act requires a Commission to be a judge, and Commissions have been headed by retired civil servants. The prestige is real and the authority is limited, and a good answer keeps those separate.

The Supreme Court, speaking through S.R. Das C.J., upheld the Act and the notification except as to one vague clause, and its reasoning must be reproduced. A Commission of Inquiry is a fact-finding body only. It has no power to adjudicate, no power to enforce anything, and its findings and recommendations are not enforceable proprio vigore, that is, they have no force of their own. Because it decides nothing and imposes nothing, it exercises no judicial power and does not trespass on the judicial function. Article 20(3) is not attracted in the way it would be in a criminal proceeding, because the person is not accused of an offence before the Commission.

And the Act is not discriminatory, because the Government may reasonably select definite matters of public importance for inquiry, though a notification whose terms are so vague as not to disclose a definite matter is bad, and one clause of this notification was struck down on that ground.

Its bearing on this question is the point on which the whole assessment turns. The very feature that saved the Act, that the Commission decides nothing, is the reason a judicial inquiry can establish what happened and cannot make anything follow from it.

The examples, in order of date

The Shah Commission, 1977 to 1978. Justice J.C. Shah, a former Chief Justice of India, inquired into the excesses committed during the Emergency, including preventive detention, censorship, the misuse of the police and the demolitions and sterilisation drives. Its three reports set out detailed findings of misuse of authority. No prosecution of consequence followed, and a later Government effectively repudiated the report. It is the standard example of an authoritative finding with no legal consequence.

The Ranganath Misra Commission, 1985 to 1986, inquired into the anti-Sikh violence of November 1984. Its report attracted sustained criticism for its methodology and its conclusions on the organisation of the violence, and its inadequacy is what produced further inquiries into the same events over the following two decades.

The Justice Nanavati and Justice Mehta Commission, 2002 to 2019, inquired into the burning of a train at Godhra and the violence that followed, and reported in parts over seventeen years, which makes the same point a second time.

Assessment

What judicial inquiries do well. They produce an authoritative public narrative of contested events, which no other institution supplies. They can examine systems, policies and patterns of conduct rather than individual guilt, and can therefore recommend reform. They can compel officials to explain themselves, under section 4, in a forum where the ordinary hierarchy does not protect them. And section 6 makes it possible to obtain frank evidence that a criminal court could never extract.

Conclusion. A judicial inquiry is an executive fact-finding inquiry conducted by a judge under the Commissions of Inquiry Act, 1952, into a definite matter of public importance. The Act gives it the powers of a civil court under section 4, additional powers of search and information-gathering under section 5, protection for its witnesses under section 6 and a duty of fair hearing to any person whose reputation may be affected under sections 8B and 8C, and requires the report and a memorandum of action taken to be laid before the House within six months under section 3(4). Ram Krishna Dalmia holds that it is a fact-finding body whose findings are unenforceable of their own force, which is why the Act is constitutional; State of Karnataka holds that the Union may appoint one to inquire into the conduct of a State's ministers, which is why the power is politically contested.

The examples, from Shah through Misra, Srikrishna and Nanavati to Liberhan, show an institution that establishes the truth with great authority and secures nothing by it, and the reform that follows is not to give the Commission judicial power but to attach obligations, of time, of reasons and of consideration by an enforcement authority, to the report it produces.

The office in the Constitution

Article 148 creates the office and gives it six protections, and each has a purpose. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India is appointed by the President by warrant under her hand and seal. He may be removed from office only in like manner and on the like grounds as a Judge of the Supreme Court, that is, by an address of both Houses supported by a majority of the total membership and by two-thirds of those present and voting, on the ground of proved misbehaviour or incapacity. He makes an oath or affirmation in the form set out in the Third Schedule. His salary and conditions of service are determined by Parliament and specified in the Second Schedule, and are not to be varied to his disadvantage during his term. He is not eligible for further office under the Government of India or of any State after he has ceased to hold office, which removes the hope of reward.

And by Article 148(5) and (6) the conditions of service of persons serving in his office are prescribed by the President after consultation with him, and the administrative expenses of his office, including salaries and pensions, are charged upon the Consolidated Fund of India, so that his budget is not voted by the House and cannot be used against him by the executive he audits.

The statutory content under Article 149

Section 13 requires him to audit all expenditure from the Consolidated Fund of India and of each State and of each Union territory having a Legislative Assembly, and to ascertain whether the moneys disbursed were legally available for and applicable to the service or purpose to which they were applied, whether the expenditure conformed to the authority governing it, and whether it was authorised by a competent authority.

Sections 14 and 15 extend audit to bodies or authorities substantially financed by grants or loans from the Consolidated Fund and to grants given for specific purposes, which brings a large part of the aided sector, including universities and autonomous bodies, within his reach. Section 16 requires him to audit all receipts of the Union and the States and to satisfy himself that the rules and procedures for the assessment, collection and allocation of revenue are being duly observed.

The loop back to Parliament

Audit without a parliamentary consumer controls nothing. He prepares the Appropriation Accounts, comparing actual expenditure with the sums appropriated, and the Finance Accounts, and his audit reports. Under Article 151 they are laid before the House. The Public Accounts Committee, constituted under Rule 308 of the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in Lok Sabha, of twenty-two members with a Chairman from the Opposition by practice since 1967, examines them, takes evidence from ministry Secretaries, and reports; the Committee on Public Undertakings does the same for undertakings; and ministries furnish Action Taken Notes. The Comptroller and Auditor General and his officers attend and assist the Committee, which is why the office is described as the friend, philosopher and guide of the Public Accounts Committee.

The audit report on the allocation of coal blocks, presented in 2012, examined allocations made through the screening committee without competitive bidding. In Manohar Lal Sharma v. Principal Secretary, (2014) 9 SCC 516, on 25 August 2014 the Supreme Court held every allocation made through that route between 1993 and 2010 to be illegal and arbitrary for want of any fair, transparent or objective procedure, and by order of 24 September 2014 cancelled two hundred and fourteen allocations; Parliament then enacted the Coal Mines (Special Provisions) Act, 2015.

The report on the Commonwealth Games of 2010, presented in 2011, examined cost escalation, delay and the award of contracts on single tenders, and was followed by inquiry and prosecution.

It arrives late, and the follow-up later. By the time a performance audit is tabled, examined and answered, the officers concerned have often moved or retired, and large numbers of Action Taken Notes remain outstanding for years, as the Committee's own reports record.

His appointment has no statutory safeguard, and this is the sharpest criticism. The Central Vigilance Commissioner is chosen by a committee containing the Leader of the Opposition under section 4 of the Act of 2003; the Lokpal by a committee containing the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice or his nominee under section 4 of the Act of 2013; and both must be chosen with regard to institutional integrity after Centre for Public Interest Litigation v. Union of India, (2011) 4 SCC 1. The officer who audits the executive is appointed by the executive alone, with no committee, no consultation and no published criteria.

The office is vested in one person, and successive reform proposals, including from the Second Administrative Reforms Commission, have urged a multi-member body on the model of the Election Commission.

Through the Public Accounts Committee that authority has changed the law of the allocation of natural resources, cancelled two hundred and fourteen coal blocks and one hundred and twenty-two telecom licences, and, in Association of Unified Telecom Service Providers, extended audit into private accounts through which public revenue passes. What the Constitution withheld is any power to stop, disallow or punish, and what practice has withheld is a transparent method of appointing him. The office controls finances by making the facts public and putting them before Parliament, which is a great deal, and it controls nothing directly, which is why the strength of the Public Accounts Committee matters as much as the strength of the auditor.

For full marks, cover: the word the question uses, which is functioning, so the answer should be built as the working cycle of the institution and not as a recitation of section 8; the sources from which work reaches the Commission; the Chief Vigilance Officer network, which is how it actually operates; the three points at which it intervenes, first stage advice, second stage advice and the review of sanction; its superintendence over the Central Bureau of Investigation and how that is exercised month by month; its preventive work, the Integrity Pact and the Independent External Monitors, which is the half of its functioning most answers omit; the annual report as the closing of the loop; the cases; and an assessment of where the machinery jams. The same institution is the subject of the first paper's question 3, where the question is whether it is strong enough; this answer describes how it works.

Where the work comes from

Five streams feed the Commission and they should be named, because the mix determines what the institution can do. Complaints from citizens and from within the administration, which arrive in very large numbers and of which only a fraction are actionable, since the Commission's complaint handling policy does not act on anonymous or pseudonymous complaints. Protected disclosures under the Public Interest Disclosure and Protection of Informers Resolution, 2004, under which the Commission is the designated agency for most central public servants and must conceal the complainant's identity. The Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2014, would have put this on a statutory footing and has never been brought into force. References from ministries and departments seeking advice.

Reports from the Chief Vigilance Officers. And matters arising from the Commission's own superintendence over the Central Bureau of Investigation, and from audit reports and parliamentary questions.

The three points of intervention

First stage advice. When a complaint or a preliminary inquiry discloses a vigilance angle, the case is referred to the Commission, which advises on how it should be proceeded with: that the complaint be closed; that the officer be warned or administratively dealt with; that a departmental inquiry be held for a major or a minor penalty; or that the matter be referred to the Central Bureau of Investigation for investigation as a criminal offence. This is the moment at which the fork between the disciplinary and the criminal route is chosen.

Second stage advice. After the departmental inquiry is complete and the inquiry officer's report is received, the case returns to the Commission, which advises on whether the charges are established and what penalty is appropriate. The disciplinary authority then passes the order.

Superintendence over the Central Bureau of Investigation

Section 8(1)(a) and (b) place the anti-corruption work of the Delhi Special Police Establishment under the Commission's superintendence, with power to give directions. In practice this is exercised by regular review, monthly and quarterly, of the progress of investigations and of trials, of cases pending beyond stipulated periods, and of preliminary enquiries not converted into regular cases. The Commission also has a role in appointments to the agency: under section 4A of the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946, as substituted by the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013, the Central Vigilance Commissioner chairs the committee that recommends the appointment of officers of the rank of Superintendent of Police and above.

The Integrity Pact. For large procurement, the Commission has recommended and standardised an agreement between the procuring organisation and every bidder, by which both undertake not to offer or accept bribes and submit to a dispute mechanism. Compliance is watched by Independent External Monitors, persons of standing appointed with the Commission's approval, who have access to all project documents and may look into complaints. This inserts an outside eye into procurement before the contract is signed, which is the point at which corruption in public works actually occurs.

Systemic improvement. The Commission examines recurring failures and recommends changes in procedure, delegation and documentation, on the reasoning that most corruption is made possible by a system that leaves unnecessary discretion in a single hand.

Leveraging technology and transparency. The Commission has consistently pressed for electronic tendering, publication of tender awards, e-payments and the reduction of face-to-face interaction, and its recommendations in this field have done more to reduce petty corruption than its disciplinary work.

Vigilance Awareness Week, observed annually, together with the requirement that organisations publish their vigilance policies, is the educative arm of the same idea.

At the top. The Act secures independence by a fixed non-renewable term with judicially protected removal, and the office has repeatedly been discharged in an acting capacity: by an order under section 10(1), A.S. Rajeev, a Vigilance Commissioner, was authorised to act as Central Vigilance Commissioner in the vacancy arising on 3 August 2026 on the completion of the tenure of Praveen Kumar Srivastava, until a Commissioner is appointed. An institution that depends on a fixed term is weakened by being run on authorisation.

And at the appointment, where the Court has intervened. In Centre for Public Interest Litigation v. Union of India, (2011) 4 SCC 1, the appointment of P.J. Thomas as Central Vigilance Commissioner in September 2010 was quashed because a charge sheet in the Palmolein case had been pending against him since 1999 and the Leader of the Opposition had dissented. The Court held the recommendation non est and laid down that the selecting committee must consider the integrity of the institution and not merely the personal integrity of the candidate, since a Commissioner facing a corruption charge cannot credibly supervise corruption investigations.

For full marks, cover: the meaning, briefly, and then the organising idea of this answer, which is what a judicial inquiry is for; the four purposes it is meant to serve, each defined, each proved by a named commission with dates, and each tested against what actually happened; the legal reason it cannot serve a fifth purpose, namely punishment, which is Ram Krishna Dalmia; the reform that follows from the analysis; and a conclusion that says which purposes the institution achieves and which it does not. The same question is set as the first paper's question 5, where it is answered through the statute and the machinery.

The first purpose: to establish an authoritative account of contested events

Some events cannot be established by any ordinary process. A criminal trial establishes whether a particular accused committed a particular offence, not what happened in a city over a fortnight. A departmental inquiry establishes an employee's liability. Neither can produce a narrative. An inquiry can, because it may act on material that would not be evidence in a court, may examine officials under section 4, and may obtain frank testimony because section 6 protects the witness.

The example is the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Commission, appointed in 1993 to inquire into the riots in Bombay in December 1992 and January 1993 and into the bomb blasts of March 1993, which reported in 1998 after examining several hundred witnesses. Its examination of the conduct of the police, station by station, remains the authoritative account of those events, and nothing produced by any prosecution approaches it.

What defeats the purpose. Nothing much, and this is the purpose the institution serves best. The one qualification is that the record can be contested politically: the State Government initially declined to accept this very report, and it was tabled only later with an Action Taken Report accepting some findings and rejecting others.

What defeats the purpose. Repudiation and delay. No prosecution of consequence followed the Shah Commission's findings, and a later Government effectively disowned the report. Where a Government announces an inquiry and then declines to act on it, the second inquiry into the same events restores nothing: the anti-Sikh violence of November 1984 was inquired into by the Ranganath Misra Commission, which reported in 1986 and was widely criticised, and again by the Nanavati Commission, which reported in 2005.

The third purpose: to fix responsibility on named persons and institutions

Section 8B assumes this purpose, because it exists precisely to protect a person whose reputation is likely to be prejudicially affected. An inquiry may name officials and ministers, describe what each did and did not do, and say plainly that a particular failure was the responsibility of a particular office.

The example is the Justice G.T. Nanavati Commission, whose report on the 1984 violence, tabled in 2005, was followed by the resignation of a Union Minister. That is the purpose realised: no court had convicted anyone, and no other process would have produced that consequence.

The example is the same Shah Commission, whose examination of the misuse of preventive detention and of emergency powers belongs to the same period and the same purpose as the constitutional amendments of 1978, which restricted the grounds of Proclamation of Emergency and strengthened the safeguards around it. The two should be stated as parts of one reaction rather than as cause and effect, but the connection is real, and it is the clearest Indian instance of an inquiry's analysis feeding into constitutional change.

What defeats the purpose. No machinery follows up. There is no obligation on any department to report what became of a recommendation, and no committee to which a memorandum under section 3(4) stands referred.

The consequence for this question is exact. Punishment is not among the purposes an inquiry can serve, and it is not a defect in the Act that it cannot punish: it is the condition on which the Act is valid. In State of Karnataka v. Union of India, (1978) 2 SCC 246, decided on 8 November 1977, the same reasoning allowed the Union to appoint a Commission to inquire into the conduct of a State's Chief Minister and ministers, the Court holding that the inquiry could not interfere with the State's administration precisely because the Commission had no power to do anything.

Conclusion. A judicial inquiry is an executive fact-finding inquiry conducted by a judge under the Act of 1952, and it exists to do four things: to establish an authoritative account of contested events, to give the public an accounting by a person the Government does not control, to fix responsibility on named persons and institutions, and to recommend reform. Measured against those purposes it succeeds at the first, as the Srikrishna Commission's account of the Bombay riots shows; it succeeds at the second only while the Government does not repudiate the result, as the Shah Commission's fate shows; it succeeds at the third rarely and slowly, as the sixteen years between the Misra and Nanavati reports and the seventeen years of the Liberhan Commission show; and it succeeds most reliably at the fourth, which is also the least contested.

It cannot punish, and Ram Krishna Dalmia explains that this is not a defect but the very reason the Act is constitutional. The institution is therefore not weak by accident. It is a fact-finding body that has been asked, by public expectation rather than by Parliament, to do the work of a court, and the sensible reform is to attach obligations of time, of reasons and of consideration to its report while leaving its fact-finding character exactly as it is.

The importance

The first reason is arithmetical. The House of the People has more than five hundred members and a sitting calendar that has in recent decades fallen well short of the averages of the first two decades after Independence. It cannot examine the demands for grants of every ministry, the audit reports laid under Article 151, the annual reports of hundreds of bodies and the detail of every Bill. A committee of twenty-two or thirty-one members, meeting through the year including when the House is not sitting, can.

The second is expertise and continuity. A committee returns to the same ministries year after year, so its members learn the subject and its officials know they will be examined again. That is a form of institutional memory the floor does not have.

The third, and the most important, is that a committee works in private and across party lines. Evidence is taken in camera, proceedings are confidential until the report is presented, and members do not speak to the gallery. The consequence is that committee reports are frequently unanimous on matters that divide the House bitterly in public, and that officials can be frank. This is the single feature that makes the committee a scrutinising body rather than a debating one.

The evidence of importance is what committees have produced. The Joint Parliamentary Committee on the securities and banking irregularities of 1992 examined the securities scam and its report was followed by the strengthening of the securities regulator and by legislation; the committee on stock market transactions in 2001 did the same after the next collapse. Bills referred to Departmentally Related Standing Committees have repeatedly emerged materially altered. And the recommendation that the Central Bureau of Investigation be given a statute of its own, now widely discussed, comes from a parliamentary committee examining that agency.

The functioning: composition and the conduct of an inquiry

Members are elected by the House from among its members according to the principle of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote, which secures representation for smaller parties, and the ordinary term is one year. The Chairman of most committees is appointed by the Speaker from among the members; for the Public Accounts Committee the practice since 1967 has been to appoint a member of the Opposition, which is the most important single convention in this field. A Minister may not be a member of a financial committee.

The functioning: the committees themselves

The financial committees are the oldest and the most powerful. The Public Accounts Committee, constituted every year under Rule 308 of the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in Lok Sabha, consists of twenty-two members, fifteen elected by the House of the People and seven by the Council of States. Its function is to examine the appropriation accounts, the finance accounts and the audit reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General, and to satisfy itself that the money granted was spent within the scope of the demand, on the purpose for which it was voted, and with propriety and economy. It examines excess expenditure before Parliament regularises it by an excess grant under Article 115. By convention it does not question policy, only its execution, though the line between the two is thin and much of its most effective work sits on it.

The Estimates Committee, of thirty members drawn only from the House of the People, examines the estimates and reports what economies, improvements in organisation, efficiency or administrative reform may be effected, and suggests the form in which the estimates should be presented. It is sometimes described as a continuous economy committee, and unlike the Public Accounts Committee it works before the money is spent.

The cases that fix the limits

Special Reference No. 1 of 1964, AIR 1965 SC 745, arising out of the case of Keshav Singh, is the leading authority on how far the power reaches. Keshav Singh, not a member, published a pamphlet against a member of the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly. The Assembly found him guilty of contempt and committed him to prison. He moved the Allahabad High Court under Article 226 and a Bench released him on bail. The Assembly then resolved that the two judges and his advocate be brought before it in custody; the judges moved the High Court, a Full Bench restrained the Assembly, and the President referred the questions to the Supreme Court under Article 143.

The Court held, by six to one, that the privileges under Article 194(3) do not extend to ousting the jurisdiction of the High Court under Article 226 or the fundamental rights; that the House may punish for contempt, including by committal, but that a person committed may invoke Articles 32 and 226; and that judges could not be summoned for the discharge of their judicial functions.

Sita Soren v. Union of India, decided on 4 March 2024, is the necessary addition on currency. A Member of the Jharkhand Legislative Assembly was alleged to have accepted a bribe to vote for a candidate in the Rajya Sabha election of 2012 and to have voted otherwise, and claimed immunity under Article 194(2). A five-judge Bench, by order of 20 September 2023, doubted P.V. Narasimha Rao v. State (CBI/SPE), (1998) 4 SCC 626, and referred the question to seven judges, who unanimously overruled it, holding that bribery is no part of legislative activity, that the immunity protects what is necessary for the free functioning of the House and not the corruption of it, and that the offence is complete on acceptance of the gratification whether or not the vote follows. A committee finding that a member took money may now be followed by an ordinary prosecution.

The limits in practice

Recommendations only. Every committee recommends; none can order. Action Taken Notes are frequently overdue and sometimes never furnished, and the committees' own reports record this.

Ministers are not summoned. By settled convention committees examine officials, not Ministers, so the person collectively responsible under Article 75(3) does not appear before the bodies that scrutinise his ministry.

Conclusion. Inquiries by legislative committees are important because they are the only means by which a large House with limited sitting days can examine the administration in detail, because they generate expertise and continuity, because they work in private and across party lines and therefore produce agreement where the floor produces argument, because they close the loops that Article 151, delegated legislation and ministerial assurances would otherwise leave open, and because the anticipation of scrutiny disciplines administration even when no report follows. They function on privileges inherited through Article 105(3) and never codified, through committees created by Rules made under Article 118, by calling for memoranda and files, examining Secretaries and other officials in private, reporting to the House and pursuing Action Taken Notes.

For full marks, cover: the distinction the question invites and which almost no candidate takes, that corruption is an offence and maladministration usually is not, so the agency's jurisdiction reaches only part of what the question names; the statutory basis of its corruption jurisdiction; how a corruption case is actually worked, because that is where the role becomes concrete; the categories of case with named examples and what became of each; the court-monitored investigation as the device by which most of its important work now arrives; the cases that define its position; the record stated honestly; and a conclusion. The agency is also the subject of the first paper's question 4, where it is described as an institution; this answer is about its casework.

The consequence for this question is important and should be stated early. The Central Bureau of Investigation has no jurisdiction over maladministration as such. It can investigate maladministration only where it is also an offence, that is, where the improper exercise of power was for an undue advantage or amounts to criminal misconduct. The residue, which is by far the larger part of the citizen's experience of bad administration, is the business of the departmental hierarchy, the Central Vigilance Commission's advisory jurisdiction over vigilance administration, the Central Information Commission under the Right to Information Act, 2005, the Lokpal and Lokayuktas within their limits, and the High Courts under Article 226.

There is no point of contact in the vigilance statute either: clauses (c) and (d) of section 8(1) of the Central Vigilance Commission Act, 2003, confine the Commission's inquiry jurisdiction to allegations of an offence under the Prevention of Corruption Act, so maladministration that is not an offence is outside the Commission exactly as it is outside the agency.

The disproportionate assets case. A public servant's assets are compared with his known sources of income over a check period. It requires no complainant and it reaches senior officers, but it depends on documentary reconstruction over many years and is slow.

The criminal misconduct or conspiracy case. These are the large matters, involving decisions rather than payments, in which the allegation is that a discretionary decision was taken for an undue advantage. They are the cases the public means when it speaks of corruption, and they are the hardest to prove because the improper motive must be established behind a decision that was formally within power.

The route a case takes. Source information or a reference arrives; a preliminary enquiry is registered, which is not an investigation under the Code and carries no coercive power; if the material justifies it a regular case is registered by first information report; investigation follows; and a final report is filed either as a charge sheet or as a closure report. Sanction to prosecute a public servant must be obtained under section 19 of the Act of 1988 from the authority competent to remove him, that is, from his own department, and the trial is before a Special Judge.

The fodder scam. Investigated from 1996 on the direction of the Patna High Court, it concerned the fraudulent withdrawal of public money from the treasuries of Bihar for the purchase of animal fodder. It ran through a series of separate trials over more than two decades and ended in the conviction and imprisonment of a former Chief Minister and many officials. It is the agency's strongest answer to the charge that it cannot carry a political case to conviction, and the reasons it succeeded are instructive: the fraud was documentary, the investigation was court-monitored, and the trials were segregated by treasury.

The second generation spectrum matter. Following the performance audit report of 2010, the agency investigated the grant of licences with spectrum in 2008. In Centre for Public Interest Litigation v. Union of India, (2012) 3 SCC 1, the Supreme Court on 2 February 2012 quashed 122 licences. The criminal prosecution, however, ended in the acquittal of all the accused in December 2017, and appeals against the acquittal have been before the Delhi High Court since. It is the clearest illustration of the gap between an audit finding, a constitutional adjudication and proof beyond reasonable doubt of a criminal conspiracy.

Public examination and recruitment scandals, of which the Vyapam matter in Madhya Pradesh, transferred to the agency by the Supreme Court in 2015, is the standard example, show the agency being used where a State's own machinery is compromised, which is the classic case for transfer.

Chit fund and deposit collection matters, such as the Saradha and Rose Valley investigations, transferred by the Supreme Court in 2014, show the same, and they are also the origin of much of the friction over consent, since they concern States that have since withdrawn general consent.

The cases that define its position

Vineet Narain v. Union of India, (1998) 1 SCC 226, decided on 18 December 1997, struck down the single directive requiring prior sanction to investigate senior officers, gave the Director a minimum tenure of two years and a transparent appointment, and placed the agency's anti-corruption work under a statutory Central Vigilance Commission. 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.

Its constitutional validity is now unresolved, and this is the most current point in the subject. In Centre for Public Interest Litigation v. Union of India, 2026 INSC 55, decided on 13 January 2026, a Bench of two judges divided. Viswanathan J. upheld section 17A as a protection for honest officers against vexatious complaints that would otherwise paralyse administration, while observing that the power to approve ought to rest with the Lokpal or a Lokayukta rather than with the Government. Nagarathna J. held it unconstitutional under Article 14, on the reasoning of Subramanian Swamy, as an impermissible classification shielding officers engaged in decision making while leaving others unprotected. The matter has been referred to the Chief Justice of India for a larger Bench, so the correct statement is that the approval requirement stands and its constitutionality is undecided.

Common Cause v. Union of India, (2019) 3 SCC 1, set aside the orders divesting the Director of his functions in October 2018, holding that section 4B(2) forbids his transfer without the previous consent of the selection committee and that stripping him of every function is in substance a transfer.

On independence, the position is unresolved. Its officers are on deputation from State cadres, its Director's tenure is protected but its budget and facilities are not, it needs the sanction of the accused officer's department to prosecute, and its jurisdiction in eleven States now depends on litigation.

Conclusion. The role of the Central Bureau of Investigation in this field is precise and narrower than the question's language suggests: it investigates corruption as an offence under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, by central public servants and by others within its extended jurisdiction, and it reaches maladministration only where the abuse of power was for an undue advantage or amounts to criminal misconduct. Its work is done through trap cases, disproportionate assets cases and large conspiracy cases, under the superintendence of the Central Vigilance Commission and, in the most important matters, under the continuing mandamus of a constitutional court.

For full marks, cover: the two senses in which the ombudsman is a responsible authority, that it makes others answerable and that it must itself be answerable, because that is the phrase the question uses and it is the organising idea; the classical model and its four defining features; the development in India from 1966; the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013, in enough detail to show what kind of authority India built; the accountability of the ombudsman itself, including the appointment, removal, reporting and the pending question about the higher judiciary; the sectoral ombudsmen, which most answers omit and which are where an Indian citizen actually meets the institution; a comparison showing where India departed from the model; and a conclusion.

Four features define it, and they are the yardstick for the whole answer. The officer is appointed by, and reports to, the legislature, which is what makes him independent of the administration he examines. His subject matter is maladministration: the catalogue usually given is bias, neglect, inattention, delay, incompetence, ineptitude, perversity and arbitrariness, none of which need amount to an offence. His procedure is informal, inquisitorial and free, so that a citizen needs no lawyer, pays no fee and files no pleading. And his power is recommendation coupled with publicity: he cannot quash an order or award damages, and his strength lies in a reasoned report to the legislature that an official behaved badly.

The fourth feature is the one that makes the institution work, and it is worth a sentence of explanation. An authority that can only recommend must be believed to be right, so it must be scrupulously fair, must give the official a hearing, and must publish. Its influence is a function of its credibility, which is why the ombudsman's own accountability is not a side issue but the source of its power.

The States acted first. Odisha enacted the first statute, the Odisha Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 1970, but did not bring the institution into operation until 1983. Maharashtra, by the Maharashtra Lokayukta and Upa-Lokayuktas Act, 1971, was the first State actually to establish the office, and it remains the oldest working Lokayukta in the country. The State statutes differ widely: some cover grievances as well as corruption, some include the Chief Minister and some do not.

A State institution also produced the strongest Indian proof that the model can work. The Karnataka Lokayukta, Justice N. Santosh Hegde, reported in July 2011 on illegal iron ore mining, naming serving ministers and officials, and the report was followed by the resignation of the Chief Minister. At that date the Union had no Lokpal at all.

The Union Act came under public pressure. Against the background of the audit reports on spectrum, the Commonwealth Games and coal, and a public movement in 2011, Parliament passed the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013, which received assent on 1 January 2014 and came into force on 16 January 2014.

A jurisdiction over corruption, reaching the highest offices. Under section 14 the Lokpal may inquire into complaints of offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, against a serving or former Prime Minister, Ministers, Members of Parliament, all Groups of central government servants, the officers of bodies established by Acts of Parliament and of government financed companies and societies, and bodies receiving foreign contribution above ten lakh rupees. The Prime Minister is included subject to three safeguards: nothing relating to international relations, external and internal security, public order, atomic energy and space; a Full Bench of not less than two thirds of the Members; and proceedings in camera, with the record not published if the complaint is dismissed. A Member of Parliament is not answerable for anything said or any vote given in the House, which is the effect of Article 105(2).

The accountability of the ombudsman itself

Appointment. Under section 4 the Chairperson and Members are appointed by the President on the recommendation of a Selection Committee of the Prime Minister, the Speaker of the House of the People, the Leader of the Opposition in that House, the Chief Justice of India or a Judge of the Supreme Court nominated by him, and one eminent jurist, with a Search Committee to prepare the panel. This is the most broadly based selection process for any Indian public authority, and it is deliberately so, because an authority whose power is persuasion must be beyond reproach in its composition. The doctrine of institutional integrity laid down in Centre for Public Interest Litigation v. Union of India, (2011) 4 SCC 1, in which the appointment of P.J.

Thomas as Central Vigilance Commissioner was quashed because a corruption charge sheet was pending against him and the Leader of the Opposition had dissented, governs such appointments generally: the committee must ask whether the appointment leaves the institution able to do its work, not merely whether the candidate is personally honest.

Section 44, which required public servants to declare the assets of their spouses and dependants, was diluted by the Lokpal and Lokayuktas (Amendment) Act, 2016, within two years of the Act coming into force.

And the question who supervises the supervisor is now live. By an order dated 27 January 2025 the Lokpal held that Judges of High Courts established by Acts of Parliament fall within section 14 and entertained a complaint against a sitting Additional Judge. The Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance and on 20 February 2025 a Bench of Gavai, Surya Kant and Oka JJ stayed the order, observing that the matter was of great significance concerning the independence of the judiciary. An amicus curiae has been appointed and the matter remains pending, so the position is that the Lokpal's order does not operate and the question is undecided.

It is the sharpest available illustration of the second sense of "responsible": an accountability institution that overreaches is itself checked, and here by the very branch whose independence Article 121 protects from parliamentary discussion.

The comparison, and the gap

India did not adopt the classical ombudsman; it built an anti-corruption prosecutor and gave it the name. The Lokpal is appointed by a committee that the executive dominates, not by the legislature. Its subject matter is offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act, so delay, arbitrariness and indifference fall outside it. Its procedure is formal, requires a complaint in the prescribed form and leads to a criminal trial. And it has powers of attachment, sanction and prosecution that no Scandinavian ombudsman possesses.

The gap is therefore structural. At the Union level there is no general grievance ombudsman for maladministration, which is what the First Administrative Reforms Commission set out to create in 1966, and the citizen's alternatives are a departmental hierarchy, a sectoral scheme where one exists, or Article 226, which is expensive and slow and was never intended to be the ordinary remedy for administrative discourtesy.

And Centre for Public Interest Litigation v. Union of India, (2011) 4 SCC 1, supplies the standard by which such an appointment is judged. The Government had appointed as Central Vigilance Commissioner an officer against whom a charge sheet in the Palmolein import case had been pending since 1999, over the recorded dissent of the Leader of the Opposition. The Court quashed the recommendation as non est, holding that the selecting committee must consider the integrity of the institution and not merely the personal integrity of the candidate, because an incumbent facing a corruption charge cannot credibly supervise corruption investigations. For an authority whose only weapon is its credibility, that reasoning applies with even greater force than it did to the Commission.

Conclusion. The ombudsman is an important responsible public authority in both senses of the phrase. It makes others answerable by receiving the citizen's complaint, investigating the conduct of officials cheaply and informally, and reporting in public; and, because its only weapon is credibility, it must itself be accountable, which is why the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013, provides for selection by a committee containing the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice or his nominee, removal only on a reference to and a finding by the Supreme Court, an annual report, and punishment for false complaints.

For full marks, cover: both notes, each worth about twelve and a half marks. For (a), what a public authority is in Indian law, because the term is the title of this paper and it has two distinct legal meanings; then maladministration defined by its catalogue and distinguished from corruption; the conditions that produce both; and the controls, arranged by kind. For (b), the two tier design, the Act of 2013 in outline with its distinctive powers, the State Lokayuktas including Maharashtra's, the record, and the pending question about the judiciary. This is the paper's own pairing and the two notes should be written so that the second follows from the first.

a) Maladministration and corruption by Public Authorities

Begin with the term the paper uses, because "public authority" has two different meanings in Indian law and the difference decides who can be held to account.

In Thalappalam Ser. Coop. Bank Ltd. v. State of Kerala, (2013) 16 SCC 82, the Supreme Court held that co-operative societies registered under a State Act are not public authorities merely because they are registered and regulated: control means control that is deep and pervasive, and substantial financing means a large share of the body's funds, so the mere fact of statutory supervision does not bring a society within section 2(h). The bearing is practical: a citizen's first weapon against maladministration is information, and whether a body must answer at all turns on this definition.

Maladministration is administrative failure that need not involve dishonesty. The catalogue usually given, drawn from the debates on the British Parliamentary Commissioner, is bias, neglect, inattention, delay, incompetence, ineptitude, perversity, turpitude and arbitrariness, to which Indian experience adds the refusal to give reasons, the failure to hear the person affected, and the mechanical or dictated exercise of discretion.

The conditions that produce both are structural, and naming them is what turns this note into analysis. Wide and unstructured discretion, so that an official may lawfully decide either way; monopoly, so that the citizen has nowhere else to go; information asymmetry, so that the citizen cannot tell whether the decision was proper; low probability of detection, because supervision is internal; and transaction cost, so that it is cheaper for the citizen to pay than to complain. Corruption is best understood as what happens when discretion and monopoly meet an absence of accountability.

The controls fall into four groups.

Constitutional and judicial. Article 14 forbids arbitrariness; Articles 32 and 226 make review available; the requirement of a fair hearing and of reasons has been read into administrative action; and the grounds of review, illegality, irrationality, procedural impropriety and proportionality, are directed precisely at maladministration.

Legislative. The question, the demand for grants, and above all the committees: the Public Accounts Committee examining the audit reports laid under Article 151, the Departmentally Related Standing Committees examining the ministries, and the Committee on Subordinate Legislation examining the rules.

The assessment. India has built a considerable apparatus against corruption and very little against maladministration. The vigilance machinery is advisory; the criminal machinery is slow and needs a sanction from the officer's own department; and there is no cheap, informal authority to which a citizen may take delay or arbitrariness. That asymmetry, and not the absence of institutions, is the subject of this paper.

The authority for all of this has to be given, because a note that lists the grounds of review without cases is an essay of opinion. That arbitrariness is itself a breach of Article 14 comes from E.P. Royappa v. State of Tamil Nadu, (1974) 4 SCC 3, where a Chief Secretary complained that his transfer to a newly created post of lower standing had been made for extraneous reasons. The Court dismissed the challenge on the facts, and held that equality and arbitrariness are sworn enemies, so that State action which is arbitrary is by that very fact unequal and offends Article 14. That holding is the doctrinal bridge between bad administration and a justiciable wrong.

b) Lokpal and Lokaukta

The design is two tier and it comes from the First Administrative Reforms Commission's interim report of October 1966, which recommended a Lokpal at the Centre for complaints against ministers and secretaries and a Lokayukta in each State and for the lower levels of the Union administration, on the Scandinavian and New Zealand models. The name Lokpal was coined by L.M. Singhvi. Ten Bills failed between 1968 and 2008.

The States legislated first. Odisha enacted the first statute in 1970 and brought it into force only in 1983; Maharashtra, under the Maharashtra Lokayukta and Upa-Lokayuktas Act, 1971, was the first State to bring the office into operation, and it is the oldest working Lokayukta in the country. State statutes vary: some cover grievances as well as corruption, some include the Chief Minister, some do not, and several States legislated only after being pressed in litigation. The Karnataka Lokayukta's report of July 2011 on illegal iron ore mining by Justice N. Santosh Hegde, followed by the resignation of the Chief Minister, is the strongest Indian demonstration that the office can work.

Power to grant sanction for prosecution under section 23; provisional attachment of the proceeds of corruption under section 29, confirmed by the Special Court under section 30, with confiscation under section 31; recommendation of transfer or suspension of officers likely to affect the investigation under section 32; and superintendence over the investigating agency in referred cases under section 25, with a bar on transferring the investigating officer without the Lokpal's approval. Section 63 obliges every State to establish a Lokayukta within one year.

The record. The first Lokpal, Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghose, was appointed on 19 March 2019, five years after the Act came into force, and held office until 27 May 2022; Justice A.M. Khanwilkar has been Chairperson since 10 March 2024. A parliamentary committee recorded that about sixty-eight per cent of complaints over four years were disposed of without any action and only three were fully investigated, and the prosecutions sanctioned are in single figures. Section 44, on the declaration of the assets of spouses and dependants, was diluted by the amending Act of 2016 within two years. Compliance with section 63 by the States has been uneven.

One decision explains the five year delay and should be cited, because it is the only judicial answer to the commonest criticism of this Act. In Common Cause (A Registered Society) v. Union of India, decided on 27 April 2017, which is a different matter from the Alok Verma decision of 2019, the petitioner attacked rules framed under the Act and sought to restrain the selection process, the real grievance being that no Lokpal had been appointed for years while the House of the People had no recognised Leader of the Opposition. The Court held that there was no legal disability in a Selection Committee short of one member constituting a Search Committee and making its recommendations, and that section 4(2) means an appointment is not invalid merely because of a vacancy in the Committee. The Act was therefore workable throughout, which puts the delay where it belongs, on the executive and not on the statute.

Conclusion. Maladministration and corruption are related but distinct failures of public authority: the first is the improper exercise of power, from delay and bias to arbitrariness, and it is generally not criminal; the second is the sale of power, and it is punishable under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.