LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Criminology 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: five limbs, and the last is the one that dates an answer, so it must be given properly with Indian material from the last decade. Define criminology and take the science question in a compact paragraph; then nature, scope and objectives, which can be done crisply; then the relationship with criminal law, which is a genuine analytical question and not a formality; then development and changing crime patterns, worked with the categories that have actually changed in India.

Definition, and the science question

Criminology is the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon, and in Sutherland and Cressey's formulation it includes within its scope the processes of making laws, breaking laws and reacting towards the breaking of laws. That definition is the one to use, because its three processes structure everything that follows.

It lacks the first, and that is the honest qualification. Crime is defined by legislatures and changes when they change it: adultery ceased to be an offence with Joseph Shine v. Union of India, (2019) 3 SCC 39, consensual homosexual conduct with Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, (2018) 10 SCC 1, and attempt to suicide effectively with section 115 of the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017. Its data are also incomplete in a patterned way, since official statistics record what was reported and registered, and figures rose after Lalita Kumari v. Government of Uttar Pradesh, (2014) 2 SCC 1, made registration mandatory without any change in conduct. Criminology is therefore a science on the terms of economics and epidemiology and not on those of chemistry: reliable about rates and patterns, probabilistic about individuals.

Nature

Its nature is fourfold. It is an empirical discipline, resting on observation rather than on doctrine. It is interdisciplinary, drawing on sociology, psychology, law, statistics, economics and medicine. It is dynamic, because its subject matter changes with legislation and with technology. And it is normative at its edges, since its penological branch asks what ought to be done and not only what is.

Relationship with criminal law

The relationship is one of dependence in one direction and influence in the other, and stating it that way is what makes the limb analytical.

Criminology depends on criminal law for its subject matter. There is no criminological object called crime independent of what the law prohibits; a criminologist studying theft in India is studying the definitions in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. That dependence is what makes the subject matter unstable, as Joseph Shine and Navtej Singh Johar show.

The impact of development on changing crime patterns

Development changes crime in five identifiable ways, and the Indian evidence for each is recent.

Urbanisation dissolves informal control. Migration to cities separates people from the kin and community supervision that restrains conduct in a village, and concentrates young men in settlements where the State's presence is thinnest. Shaw and McKay's finding that delinquency rates remain stable in particular urban zones across changing populations, and Durkheim's anomie, are the theoretical statements of this, and Mumbai has been the standing Indian illustration for a century.

Prosperity changes the target and the motive. Merton's strain theory predicts that a society which raises expectations of material success faster than it distributes the means will produce innovation, which is the criminal adaptation, and the Indian record fits: as incomes have risen, property crime has shifted from subsistence theft towards fraud, and offences of aspiration such as vehicle theft and snatching have grown, which is why the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 gives snatching a separate provision.

Development also produces its own victims and its own conflicts. Displacement by infrastructure and mining, the loss of common land, and disputes over acquisition generate offences that did not exist before the project, and the criminal law arrives after the grievance rather than before it.

The legislative recognition of these shifts is in the new Sanhita itself, and it is worth naming. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, in force from 1 July 2024, creates distinct offences of organised crime and petty organised crime, of terrorist act, of snatching, and of murder by a group on specified grounds, none of which existed as such in the Indian Penal Code of 1860. Those are the offences of an urbanised, mobile and connected society, and they are the clearest evidence that the pattern of Indian crime has changed and that the law has followed it.

A caution belongs at the end of this limb. Recorded crime is not crime, and part of what looks like a change in the pattern is a change in reporting: mobile telephones make complaint easier, registration is now mandatory after Lalita Kumari, and public tolerance of offences against women has fallen, all of which raise the figures without raising the conduct. A criminologist who reports a rise without asking whether the register changed is describing administration rather than behaviour.

Indian law carries several of these at once, which is worth saying in a question on scope: a classical code in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, neo classical exceptions in its sections 20 to 24, positivist sentencing machinery in the probation and juvenile legislation, and cartographic administration in every crime map a commissionerate produces.

Conclusion. Criminology is the empirical study of crime, criminals, victims and the response of the criminal justice system, and it is a science in the sense in which economics and epidemiology are, with the important qualification that its subject matter is defined by legislatures and its data by police registers. Its scope covers the making of law, the breaking of law and the reaction to law breaking; its objectives are causation, prevention, treatment, law reform and policy; and its relationship with criminal law is one of mutual dependence, since criminology takes its subject matter from the law and the law takes its facts and its instruments of individualisation from criminology. Development has changed the Indian pattern in five ways, through urbanisation, prosperity, technology, liberalisation and displacement, and the new offences in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 are the legislature's acknowledgement of it.

His method was anthropometric. He measured the skulls and bodies of convicts and of soldiers and conducted post mortem examinations, of which the most cited was on the brigand Giuseppe Villella, in whose skull he found a depression at the base which he identified with a feature of lower animals.

His central claim is atavism. A substantial proportion of offenders are biological throwbacks to an earlier evolutionary stage, born criminal, and identifiable by physical stigmata: an asymmetrical face, a large jaw and cheekbones, a receding forehead, unusual ear size and shape, long arms relative to height, excessive body hair, insensitivity to pain and a taste for tattooing.

His classification of offenders should be given. The born criminal, atavistic and incorrigible. The insane criminal, whose offending arises from mental disorder. The criminaloid, an occasional offender pushed by circumstance. The criminal by passion, offending under overwhelming emotion. And, added later, the habitual criminal, made by environment and association.

The critical analysis has four parts.

Fourth, and most seriously, the theory's logic is dangerous. If criminality is inborn and visible, the response is incapacitation of a class of persons rather than punishment of acts, and that reasoning supported sterilisation laws and the classification of whole communities as criminal. India's own experience of that logic is the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871, under which communities were notified as criminal by birth; the Criminal Tribes Act Enquiry Committee under M. Ananthasayanam Ayyangar, appointed in 1949, reported in 1950 recommending repeal, the repealing Act followed in 1952 and the communities were denotified, but several States then enacted Habitual Offenders legislation which reproduced part of the logic, and the National Commission for Denotified, Nomadic and Semi Nomadic Tribes under Balkrishna Renke, reporting in 2008, and under Bhiku Ramji Idate, reporting in December 2017, both recorded the continuing consequences.

Its modern form dates from about 1970. Richard Quinney's The Social Reality of Crime, 1970, argued that criminal definitions are formulated and applied by the segments of society with power to shape public policy. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young's The New Criminology, 1973, demanded a criminology adequate to explain both the deviant act and the social reaction to it, rejecting both the biological positivism of Lombroso and the correctionalism of mainstream sociology. William Chambliss's history of vagrancy law showed a criminal category created and reshaped to follow the labour needs of the propertied. Rusche and Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure, 1939, had already argued that penal forms correspond to modes of production.

Its central propositions are three. Conduct is criminal because it has been defined as such, and definitions are made by those with the power to make them. The criminal justice system operates differentially, so that the same conduct attracts prosecution in one class and regulation in another. And the discipline itself is complicit when it studies only the offenders the system produces.

Two prison decisions carry the radical claim further, and both are worked because a citation alone would prove nothing. In Sunil Batra v. Delhi Administration, (1978) 4 SCC 494, a prisoner under sentence of death challenged his solitary confinement and the use of bar fetters on other prisoners. The Supreme Court held that a prisoner does not lose his fundamental rights at the prison gate, that solitary confinement before the sentence became final was unlawful, that bar fetters could not be imposed without recorded reasons and review, and that the conditions of confinement are justiciable under Articles 14, 19 and 21. The decision matters here because it refuses the premise on which a class based penal system rests, that the convicted are outside the constitutional order.

In State of Gujarat v. High Court of Gujarat, (1998) 7 SCC 392, the Court dealt with prison labour, and held that prisoners compelled to work must be paid reasonable wages, since exacting labour without payment offends Article 23, and that a portion of the wages may be set aside as compensation for victims of the offence. Rusche and Kirchheimer's claim that penal forms follow the labour market is exactly the relationship the decision regulates, and it is the clearest Indian instance of a court correcting it.

Relevance in modern criminology

Lombroso's theory is dead and his shift is alive. No serious criminologist holds that offenders are identifiable by physical stigmata. What survives is the proposition that the individual offender's characteristics are relevant and can be studied empirically, and modern biosocial criminology is its cautious descendant: twin and adoption studies show a modest heritable component in antisocial behaviour, and there is consistent evidence associating low resting heart rate and reduced autonomic reactivity with later antisocial conduct. The discipline states these as probabilistic contributions interacting with environment, which is exactly what Lombroso's first edition did not do.

In India that question is not academic. It explains why adulteration that kills is a licensing matter and theft is a crime; why the Lentin Commission had to be appointed to reach the political and regulatory chain behind fourteen deaths at the J.J. Hospital in 1986; why section 13(1)(d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, the head under which abuse of official position was charged, was deleted in 2018 while the offences of the poor were left untouched; and why two thirds or more of Indian prisoners are undertrials.

Conclusion. Lombroso and the radical criminologists are the two extremes of the subject and both are instructive for opposite reasons. Lombroso was wrong in substance and right in method: his claim was refuted by Goring within a generation, and its logic produced the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 in India, yet his insistence on studying the offender empirically is the origin of every modern instrument of individual assessment. The radical criminologists were right in their question and weak in their answers: they cannot explain why one person offends and another does not, but no Indian account of criminal justice can survive their central challenge, which is that the composition of our prisons and the fate of section 13(1)(d) are facts about who writes the law and not only about who breaks it.

Socio cultural factors

The theory. Thorsten Sellin's Culture Conflict and Crime, 1938, holds that every group carries conduct norms prescribing how a person should behave in a given situation, that criminal law embodies the norms of the dominant group, and that conflict arises either between two distinct cultures, which he called primary conflict, or within one culture as it differentiates, which he called secondary conflict. Wolfgang and Ferracuti's The Subculture of Violence, 1967, applied the idea to homicide, arguing that in some groups violence is an expected and approved response to insult, so that resort to it requires no inhibition to be overcome. Sutherland's differential association supplies the transmission mechanism: criminal behaviour is learned in intimate personal groups through an excess of definitions favourable to violation of law.

The evaluation. The evidence is strong, because the theory makes predictions that could fail and do not: offending profiles of migrant groups track the region of origin in the first generation and converge later, and homicide in India concentrates in circumstances of quarrel, insult and land dispute rather than acquisitive motive. The danger is that cultural explanation slides into cultural blame, and India has a documented history of exactly that in the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871. The safeguard is to treat the subculture as itself produced by structural conditions, which is what Cloward and Ohlin's differential opportunity does.

Economic factors

The theory. Bonger's Criminality and Economic Conditions, 1905, located crime in the egoism cultivated by a competitive economy. Merton's Social Structure and Anomie, 1938, is the more useful modern statement: a society prescribing a common goal of material success while distributing legitimate means unequally generates strain, to which the adaptations are conformity, innovation, which is the criminal one, ritualism, retreatism and rebellion. Cloward and Ohlin added that illegitimate means are also unequally distributed.

Psychological factors

The theory. Eysenck's Crime and Personality, 1964, associates criminality with high extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism, the mechanism being conditionability, since conscience is built from conditioned responses and those who condition poorly acquire a weaker one from the same upbringing. Bowlby's study of forty four juvenile thieves, 1944, linked early and prolonged separation from the mother to what he called the affectionless character. Gottfredson and Hirschi's A General Theory of Crime, 1990, reduces the psychological account to low self control formed by ineffective early parenting. Cleckley's The Mask of Sanity, 1941, described psychopathy, which Hare's checklist made measurable and which predicts violent reoffending better than most variables.

The evaluation. The evidence for early attachment failure, impulsivity and low self control is good and replicated. The evidence for personality typologies is weaker, and the psychoticism dimension is the only one of Eysenck's three with consistent support. Serious mental illness explains a small fraction of crime, and the mentally ill are more often victims than offenders, so the public weighting of this factor is badly wrong. And the whole group shares a limitation: psychological factors explain who, within a given environment, is most likely to offend, and cannot explain why one environment produces more offending than another.

Influence of mass media

The theory. Albert Bandura's experiments from 1961, in which children who watched an adult attack an inflatable doll reproduced the aggression, established observational learning and are the foundation of every argument in this area. The mechanisms proposed are imitation, desensitisation to violence, the cultivation of an exaggerated fear of crime, and the supply of techniques and of definitions favourable to offending, which is differential association operating through a screen.

The evaluation is where this limb earns its marks, because the honest answer is unpopular. The experimental evidence for short term imitation is good; the evidence that media consumption causes serious criminal violence over the long term is weak and contested, and the aggregate data are unhelpful, since media saturation has risen everywhere while violent crime rates have moved in different directions in different countries. What the evidence does support is the cultivation effect, that heavy consumers overestimate the risk of victimisation, which matters because fear of crime drives policy independently of crime. The right conclusion is that media influence is real at the level of technique, fear and, in the Indian context, the prejudicing of trials and the inflaming of communal feeling, and unproved at the level of causing serious violence in an individual.

Conclusion. Of the four groups the question names, the socio cultural is the strongest in India and the most distinctive, since caste, communal division and dowry generate offending that no imported theory contains; the economic is strong for property and white collar crime and weak for violence, and operates through relative deprivation rather than poverty; the psychological explains who within an environment offends and carries far more legal weight than causal weight, as Surendra Mishra, Devidas Loka Rathod and Accused X show; and the influence of mass media is the weakest of the four on the evidence, real for technique, fear and prejudice to trials and unproved for serious violence. They interact rather than compete, which is why no Indian court decides a sentence on any one of them alone.

It is a species of what Upendra Baxi called privileged class deviance, in The Crisis of the Indian Legal System, 1982: deviant behaviour by those holding social, economic or political power, which is widely known, causes great harm and is very rarely visited with criminal consequence. Baxi's categories included legislators, administrators, the police, professionals and the affluent, and the first three are official deviance.

Three features distinguish it from ordinary criminality. The deviance is committed through the exercise of a lawful power, so the act looks like the office's ordinary work. The victim is diffuse, since a wrongly awarded contract injures the public rather than a person who will complain. And the wrongdoer controls the record, since the file is the evidence and the file is his.

The Lentin Commission is the fullest Indian documentation of it. After fourteen patients died at the J.J. Hospital, Bombay, in early 1986 from glycerol adulterated with industrial diethylene glycol, Justice B. Lentin found a repacking licence granted without diligence, purchase on price without regard to quality, a pharmacology panel influenced by payment, a testing laboratory without capacity, and interference in the Food and Drug Administration by politicians including serving and former health ministers. Every link in that chain is official deviance and only one of them, the bribe, is obviously a crime.

The legal mechanisms

Internal and departmental. Disciplinary rules under the service conduct rules and the police manuals; departmental vigilance through Chief Vigilance Officers; and, for the police specifically, the Police Complaints Authorities at State and district level directed in Prakash Singh v. Union of India, (2006) 8 SCC 1.

Parliamentary and financial. The Public Accounts Committee under Rule 308 of the Lok Sabha Rules, examining the Comptroller and Auditor General's reports laid under Article 151(1), together with the Estimates Committee and the Committee on Public Undertakings. Their sanction is publicity, and the reach of the audit that feeds them was upheld in Association of Unified Tele Services Providers v. Union of India, (2014) 6 SCC 110, where the Supreme Court held that the auditor may examine the accounts of a private telecom licensee so far as is necessary to see whether the Union is receiving its share of revenue.

Human rights machinery. The Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993 constitutes the National Human Rights Commission, which under section 12 may inquire, on its own motion or on a petition, into a violation of human rights or negligence in preventing one by a public servant; under section 18 may recommend to the Government the payment of compensation or the initiation of proceedings and must publish its report; and under section 19 may only seek a report from the Central Government in respect of the armed forces and then make recommendations. Two limits belong in the answer: its findings are recommendatory, and under section 36(2) it cannot inquire into a matter more than one year after the alleged violation.

Statutory codification of the judicial safeguards. The arrest requirements are now in the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, and section 196(2) makes a magisterial inquiry mandatory where a person dies or disappears, or a woman is raped, in police custody. Arnesh Kumar v. State of Bihar, (2014) 8 SCC 273, requires an officer to satisfy himself of the necessity of arrest and to record and forward reasons. Lalita Kumari v. Government of Uttar Pradesh, (2014) 2 SCC 1, makes registration of a first information report mandatory where the information discloses a cognizable offence. And Paramvir Singh Saini v. Baljit Singh, (2021) 1 SCC 184, decided on 2 December 2020, requires closed circuit cameras with night vision and audio at every entry, exit, lock up and corridor of a police station, with storage and a duty on the station house officer to report faults.

Transparency. The Right to Information Act, 2005 has in practice become the citizen's most used instrument against official deviance, because it reaches the file, which is where the deviance is recorded, and it does so without requiring the citizen to prove anything.

What the survey shows

Three conclusions follow and they are the marks in the last limb.

Conclusion. Official deviance is the abuse of a public office through the exercise of its own powers, and police deviance is its most dangerous species because the office carries force and liberty. India's control mechanisms are numerous and layered, running from departmental vigilance through the Public Accounts Committee, the Central Vigilance Commission, the Lokpal, commissions of inquiry and the human rights commissions to the courts and the Right to Information Act; but most of them can only advise, recommend or report. What has actually changed police behaviour has come from the courts, in Nilabati Behera, D.K. Basu, Prakash Singh and Paramvir Singh Saini, and what has actually reached corrupt officials is the disproportionate assets presumption, and both work for the same reason, that they either create a record or shift a burden rather than issuing advice.

Four structural features explain the vulnerability. Information asymmetry: the client cannot evaluate the service, which is why he needed the professional. Monopoly: entry is restricted by law, so he cannot easily go elsewhere. Self regulation: the profession disciplines its own, and every professional body is at once a regulator and a trade association. And the fiduciary character of the relationship, which makes betrayal both easier and graver than in an arm's length transaction.

Judges

The forms are the acceptance of illegitimate consideration, favouritism in listing and in appointment, delay, and misconduct in the exercise of discretion. The office is protected because independence requires it, and the protection is very strong.

Removal is only by the process in Articles 124(4) and 217, worked out by the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968, and it has never yet removed a judge: the motion against Justice V. Ramaswami failed in the Lok Sabha in 1993 for want of the required majority, and Justice Soumitra Sen resigned in 2011 after the Rajya Sabha had passed the motion and before the Lok Sabha voted.

The Press Council of India is the statutory answer, under the Press Council Act, 1978. Its object under section 13(1) is to preserve the freedom of the Press and to maintain and improve the standards of newspapers and news agencies. Its composition under section 5 is a Chairman, nominated by a committee of the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and a member elected by the Council, with twenty eight members drawn from working journalists, editors, owners, news agencies, three nominating bodies and Parliament.

What has curbed the worst practices came from other institutions. In Ashok Shankarrao Chavan v. Madhavrao Kinhalkar, (2014) 7 SCC 99, decided on 5 May 2014, the Supreme Court held that the Election Commission may inquire into the correctness of a return of election expenses and disqualify a candidate under section 10A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, which is how paid news is actually punished. In Sahara India Real Estate Corporation Ltd. v. Securities and Exchange Board of India, (2012) 10 SCC 603, five judges held that a court may order the postponement of publication of proceedings where there is a real and substantial risk of prejudice to a fair trial. And in R.K. Anand v. Registrar, Delhi High Court, (2009) 8 SCC 106, the Delhi High Court convicted a senior advocate of criminal contempt after a sting exposed the fixing of the sole eyewitness in the BMW hit and run trial and prohibited him from appearing before it for four months, the Supreme Court affirming the guilt and issuing notice for enhancement.

The criminal standard was fenced in Jacob Mathew v. State of Punjab, (2005) 6 SCC 1, where a patient in acute respiratory distress died when the oxygen cylinder attached to him was found empty. Three judges held that criminal negligence requires a gross degree of want of care, that an error of judgment or the choice of one of two accepted courses is not negligence, and directed that a doctor is not to be prosecuted for negligence in treatment without a credible independent medical opinion and is not to be arrested routinely.

Disciplinary control has been rebuilt and immediately faltered. The National Medical Commission Act, 2019 replaced the Medical Council of India with an Ethics and Medical Registration Board; the Commission notified the Registered Medical Practitioner (Professional Conduct) Regulations, 2023 on 2 August 2023, requiring generic prescribing and restricting pharmaceutical sponsorship, and kept them in abeyance on 23 August 2023 after protest, restoring the 2002 ethics regulations.

Beyond malpractice, two regimes reach conduct that requires a doctor. The Pre conception and Pre natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994 prohibits communication of the sex of the foetus and places the burden of proving compliance on the practitioner, and in Voluntary Health Association of Punjab v. Union of India, (2013) 4 SCC 1, the Supreme Court directed the States to constitute the statutory bodies, seize unregistered machines and report on prosecutions. The Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 1994 confines donation to the defined categories and makes commercial dealing an offence.

Their disciplinary regimes are statutory and self administered, exactly like those of doctors and lawyers. Chartered accountants are governed by the Chartered Accountants Act, 1949, whose First and Second Schedules define professional misconduct and whose Disciplinary Committee may reprimand, fine or remove a member from the register. After the Satyam accounting fraud disclosed in January 2009 and the corporate failures of 2018, Parliament created an independent audit regulator, the National Financial Reporting Authority, under section 132 of the Companies Act, 2013, with power to investigate and to debar. Section 447 of the Companies Act, 2013 created a statutory offence of fraud, and section 212 put the Serious Fraud Investigation Office on a statutory footing.

The critical point is that the technocrat's deviance is the enabling condition of most large white collar offending. A fraud on a bank requires a valuation; a fraudulent account requires an audit; an illegal construction requires a certificate. That is why regulation of these professions has moved, uniquely among the four, from self regulation towards an independent statutory regulator.

Comparing the four regimes

Conclusion. Professional deviance is the deviance of those to whom the law has given a monopoly and asked to police themselves, and the four professions the question names show four different failures of that arrangement. The judiciary is protected by a removal procedure that has never removed anybody and disciplined by an in house procedure with no statutory force. Journalism is regulated by a Council with a good code and no sanction beyond censure, whose own paid news report was abridged before publication, so that the real remedies have come from the Election Commission and the courts. Medicine is controlled effectively only from outside, by the consumer forum after V.P. Shantha and by the criminal courts under the Jacob Mathew standard, while its own new code of conduct was kept in abeyance three weeks after notification. And the technocrats, whose certificates make most large frauds possible, are the only group for whom India has moved towards an independent regulator, in the National Financial Reporting Authority. The pattern is consistent: self regulation fails where the profession's revenue is at stake, and the remedy has come from institutions the profession does not control.

Consolidation. Before 1988 the law was split between the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1947 and sections 161 to 165A of the Indian Penal Code, which the 1988 Act repealed. That is why the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 contains no general offence of a public servant taking a bribe.

Enlargement. The Act widened the definition of public servant far beyond section 21 of the Penal Code, enlarged criminal misconduct, and provided for trial by special Judges.

International compliance. India ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption in 2011, and the Prevention of Corruption (Amendment) Act, 2018, in force from 26 July 2018, was enacted largely to meet its requirements: criminalising bribery in both directions, reaching commercial organisations, and providing for confiscation.

Which forum tries it. Only a special Judge appointed under section 3, with the powers of a Court of Session under section 5. That exclusivity is not formal: in A.R. Antulay v. R.S. Nayak, (1988) 2 SCC 602, seven judges set aside a direction of the Supreme Court itself transferring a trial to the High Court, holding that it deprived the accused of the trial by special Judge required by the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1952 and of his right of appeal, and so violated Articles 14 and 21.

Section 13, criminal misconduct, now confined to 13(1)(a) misappropriation of entrusted property and 13(1)(b) intentional illicit enrichment, punishable under section 13(2) with four to ten years and fine. The former 13(1)(d), obtaining a pecuniary advantage by abusing position, was deleted in 2018. Sections 14 and 15 punish the habitual offender and an attempt at misappropriation.

Proof. Section 20 presumes that an undue advantage proved to have been accepted was accepted as a motive or reward. Explanation 1 to section 13(1)(b) presumes intentional illicit enrichment from possession of pecuniary resources disproportionate to known sources of income which the public servant cannot satisfactorily account for, Explanation 2 confining known sources to lawful income. Section 23 provides that in a charge under section 13(1)(a) it is sufficient to specify the gross sum and the dates between which the offence was committed.

Second, the Act is the anchor of the institutional framework. The Central Vigilance Commission Act, 2003 gives the Commission superintendence over the Delhi Special Police Establishment specifically "in so far as it relates to the investigation of offences alleged to have been committed under the Prevention of Corruption Act", and the whole of that structure comes from Vineet Narain v. Union of India, (1998) 1 SCC 226, decided on 18 December 1997, which directed statutory status for the Commission, a minimum two year tenure for the Director of the investigating agency and the abolition of the Single Directive requiring prior approval to investigate senior officers. The Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 operates on the same offences, its section 14 reaching a serving Prime Minister and its section 20 routing complaints against Group A and B officers to the Commission.

Third, the Act has been used against the whole range of office holders, and the illustrations show it. Against a judge, in K. Veeraswami. Against a bank officer in the private sector, in Ramesh Gelli. Against a Chief Minister, in the Antulay litigation. And against officials in the coal block allocations, where the Supreme Court cancelled 204 allocations in 2014 and the special court convicted officials and company officers on charges including misrepresentation in the applications.

Fifth, the 2018 amendment has made that obstruction worse in two respects while improving the offences. The deletion of section 13(1)(d) removed the head under which the corrupt exercise of discretion was charged. The insertion of section 17A added a gate before the sanction gate, and its own validity produced a split verdict in Centre for Public Interest Litigation v. Union of India, 2026 INSC 55, decided in January 2026: one judge would have struck it down under Article 14 as foreclosing inquiry at the threshold and shielding the corrupt, the other upheld it on condition that approval follow the recommendation of the Lokpal or the State Lokayukta. The matter is before a larger Bench and the section remains in force.

What the Act does not do

A discussion of scope should say what falls outside, since two omissions matter in practice.

Bribery in the wholly private sector is not an offence under this Act. Where no public servant is involved and no commercial organisation is bribing one, a commercial kickback is dealt with as criminal breach of trust or cheating under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, or under the Companies Act, 2013, and not under the corruption statute. The United Nations Convention against Corruption asks States to consider criminalising private sector bribery, and India has not done so.

For full marks, cover: three notes of about twelve and a half marks each. Each should have a concept, its founders with dates, its central proposition, its Indian application and its criticism. Resist writing a full answer on any one of them; the discipline of the short note is what is being marked, and all three of these topics are set as full questions elsewhere in this subject.

(a) The cartographic school

The cartographic or geographical school is the first statistical criminology, and it is older than positivism, which is the fact most often got wrong. It arose in the 1830s from the publication of national judicial statistics in France from 1827.

Its central proposition follows from the first finding. If the number of offences is nearly constant while the individuals committing them change every year, the explanation cannot lie wholly in those individuals; hence Quetelet's formulation that society prepares the crime and the offender is merely the instrument by which it is carried out. Durkheim's later claim that crime is a normal social fact is in this line of descent.

Its descendants are the most practically important criminology in use. Shaw and McKay's Chicago studies of the 1930s, which found delinquency rates stable in particular zones across changing populations; Cohen and Felson's routine activity theory of 1979; environmental criminology; crime prevention through environmental design; and hot spot policing, whose central finding, that crime concentrates at a small number of places, is Quetelet's regularity converted into a deployment order.

Its Indian application is continuous. The National Crime Records Bureau has published Crime in India annually since 1953, reporting incidence and rate per lakh of population by State and city, and every State comparison and every city crime map is this school's method in use.

Its three classic statements are empirical. William Healy's The Individual Delinquent, 1915, built the full case history from work with Chicago juveniles. Cyril Burt's The Young Delinquent, 1925, identified about one hundred and seventy contributory conditions among London schoolchildren. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck's Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency, 1950, matched five hundred delinquents with five hundred non delinquents on age, ethnic origin, intelligence and neighbourhood, which is what allows a difference to be attributed to something other than poverty. Its ancestor is Ferri's division of causes into anthropological, physical and social.

Its factors are conventionally grouped as biological and constitutional, psychological, familial, educational, economic, social and ecological, cultural and situational; and an Indian list must add caste, communal division, dowry and land and boundary disputes, which no Western enumeration contains.

Its Indian survival is legal rather than theoretical, and this is the note's best point. Section 4 of the Probation of Offenders Act, 1958 requires the court to consider the probation officer's report on the character and circumstances of the offender, and section 6 forbids imprisoning an offender under twenty one for most offences without recorded reasons after considering it. Section 15 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 requires a preliminary assessment of a child of sixteen to eighteen charged with a heinous offence, covering capacity, understanding of consequences and the circumstances of the offence. And Manoj v. State of Madhya Pradesh, (2023) 2 SCC 353, directs that psychiatric, psychological, social history and jail conduct reports be gathered and placed before a court before a sentence of death.

(c) The notion of privileged class deviance

The expression is Upendra Baxi's, from The Crisis of the Indian Legal System, 1982: deviant behaviour by those holding social, economic or political power, which is widely known, causes great harm and is very rarely visited with criminal consequence.

The Indian illustrations are exact. In education, capitation survived the whole constitutional sequence from Mohini Jain v. State of Karnataka, (1992) 3 SCC 666, which held that the right to education flows from Article 21 and that a capitation fee is arbitrary, through Unni Krishnan J.P. v. State of Andhra Pradesh, (1993) 1 SCC 645, and T.M.A. Pai Foundation v. State of Karnataka, (2002) 8 SCC 481, to P.A. Inamdar v. State of Maharashtra, (2005) 6 SCC 537, holding capitation and profiteering impermissible. In medicine, the National Medical Commission notified its conduct regulations on 2 August 2023 and kept them in abeyance on 23 August 2023. In the drug supply chain, the Lentin Commission traced fourteen deaths at the J.J. Hospital, Bombay, in 1986 through a bribed pharmacology panel and a captured Food and Drug Administration to serving and former health ministers. And in the criminal process itself, Hussainara Khatoon v. Home Secretary, State of Bihar, (1980) 1 SCC 81, disclosed thousands of undertrials held longer than the maximum sentence because they could not furnish bail, which is the same proposition seen from the other end.

And one further point belongs in the note on privileged class deviance. The concept is not merely academic in India: it explains the shape of the syllabus, the existence of the Central Vigilance Commission and the Lokpal, and the fact that the offences of the powerful are prosecuted, when at all, by specialised agencies before special courts, while the offences of the powerless are prosecuted by the ordinary police before magistrates. Two different criminal justice systems operate in the same country, and Baxi's contribution was to insist that criminology study both.

Conclusion. The three notes are three parts of one argument about what criminology looks at. The cartographic school made crime measurable and taught the discipline to look at patterns rather than persons, at the cost of trusting the register. The multiple factor theory looked at the person and produced a list rather than an explanation, surviving as the method by which Indian courts assess individuals. And privileged class deviance asks the question the other two do not: whose conduct enters the register in the first place, which is why the Indian prison population and the fate of section 13(1)(d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act belong in a criminology answer at all.