LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Criminology 2015 Question Paper with Solutions

(a) Public Accounts Committee

The Public Accounts Committee is the oldest of Parliament's financial committees and the point at which criminology's interest in administrative deviance meets the machinery of the Constitution. It was first set up in 1921 under the Government of India Act, 1919, and it survived independence unchanged in form. It is constituted every year under Rule 308 of the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in Lok Sabha, which is a rule of the House and not a statute, so the committee owes its existence to Parliament's own procedure rather than to any Act.

Its strength is twenty two: fifteen members elected by the Lok Sabha and seven by the Rajya Sabha, in each case by proportional representation with the single transferable vote, so that minority opinion in the House is reflected in the committee. The term is one year. A Minister cannot be elected to it, and a member who is appointed a Minister ceases to be a member from the date of appointment. Since 1967 it has been the settled convention that the Speaker appoints the Chairman from the Opposition, which is what gives the committee its adversarial character.

The reach of that audit, and so of the committee's raw material, was settled in Association of Unified Tele Services Providers v. Union of India, (2014) 6 SCC 110, decided on 17 April 2014. Private telecom licensees challenged Rule 5 of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, Service Providers (Maintenance of Books of Accounts and other Documents) Rules, 2002, under which the Comptroller and Auditor General sought to examine their books. Their argument was simple and strong: they are private companies, Article 149 speaks of the accounts of the Union and the States, and a private balance sheet is not a public account.

The Court rejected the argument and upheld the Rule, though it fenced the audit carefully. Spectrum is a natural resource held for the people; the licences work on revenue sharing, so a share of the licensee's gross revenue is money due to the Consolidated Fund of India; and the Comptroller and Auditor General may examine the licensee's accounts to the extent necessary to see whether the Union is getting its due share. The audit was confined to that revenue purpose and did not become a general audit of a private company. The reason given was constitutional rather than commercial: Parliament must know how the nation's wealth has been dealt with, and the report reaches Parliament under Article 151(1).

Parliament's own capacity to police its members shows both the strength and the limit of this route. In Raja Ram Pal v. Hon'ble Speaker, Lok Sabha, (2007) 3 SCC 184, eleven members were expelled after a television sting showed them accepting money to ask questions in the House. The Supreme Court held that Parliament possesses the power to expel a member as part of the privileges it inherited under Article 105(3), but also held, and this is the part that matters here, that the exercise of that power is subject to judicial review on limited grounds, including gross illegality and violation of natural justice. Self policing is real, and it is not beyond law.

(b) Victimology

Victimology is the systematic study of the victim of crime: who is victimised, why, what the victim suffers beyond the immediate harm, and what the criminal justice system owes in return. It grew as a distinct field from the work of Hans von Hentig, whose The Criminal and His Victim appeared in 1948 and proposed that victim and offender are a pair, and of Benjamin Mendelsohn, who coined the term and offered a typology of victims ranged by their degree of contribution to their own victimisation.

Indian law now carries a statutory scheme, and it must be given by section. The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, in force from 1 July 2024, defines the victim, and then: section 395 allows a court imposing a sentence of fine to order payment out of the fine as compensation; section 396 requires every State Government, in coordination with the Centre, to prepare a victim compensation scheme, with the District or State Legal Services Authority deciding quantum and completing its enquiry within two months; section 397 obliges all hospitals, public or private, to give first aid or medical treatment free of cost to victims of the sexual offences and acid attack provisions listed there, and to inform the police at once; and section 398 requires every State Government to notify a witness protection scheme.

The reach of section 396 is what makes it more than a re enactment. Compensation under it does not depend on conviction. Sub section (4) allows the victim to apply where the offender is not traced or identified and no trial takes place at all, and sub section (3) allows a recommendation where the case ends in acquittal or discharge. The State's obligation is thus detached from the outcome of the prosecution, which is the practical difference between a compensatory jurisdiction and a costs jurisdiction.

In Mallikarjun Kodagali v. State of Karnataka, (2019) 2 SCC 752, the question was standing. The victim of an assault sought to appeal against the acquittal of the accused, and the High Court required him to obtain special leave. The Supreme Court held that the proviso to section 372 of the Code, inserted in 2009, confers on the victim an independent right of appeal against acquittal, conviction for a lesser offence or inadequate compensation, and that no leave is required. The judgment opens with the observation that the criminal law of India is not victim oriented and that the suffering of the victim has gone unnoticed, which is the sentence to quote if the question is about victimology rather than procedure.

The constitutional route runs alongside the statutory one. In Rudul Sah v. State of Bihar, (1983) 4 SCC 141, a man was kept in prison for fourteen years after his acquittal. The Supreme Court awarded compensation in a petition under Article 32 itself, holding that the right to move the Court for enforcement of Article 21 would be a hollow guarantee if the Court could only declare the violation and send the victim away to a civil suit. That is the origin of public law compensation in India, and it remains the remedy where the wrongdoer is the State.

The causes are structural more than personal. The Police Act of 1861 was drafted after 1857 to give the executive a disciplined instrument, not a citizen's service, and its command structure survives. Investigation and law and order are not separated, so the same overworked officer chases a riot and a rape. Performance is measured by detection, which rewards a confession over an investigation. Training, forensic support and manpower are inadequate to the workload, and the constable, who meets the public, is the least trained person in the hierarchy.

The constitutional control begins with the two custodial death cases. In Nilabati Behera v. State of Orissa, (1993) 2 SCC 746, a mother's letter about her son, who was taken into police custody and whose body was found on a railway track the next morning, was treated as a writ petition. The State pleaded that he had escaped. The Court found the injuries inconsistent with a railway accident, awarded compensation of one lakh fifty thousand rupees under Article 32, and held that sovereign immunity, which may be available in a private law action in tort, is not a defence to a claim in public law for violation of a fundamental right.

In Prakash Singh v. Union of India, (2006) 8 SCC 1, the Court attacked the structure itself. On a petition by two former Directors General of Police, it issued seven directions: a State Security Commission to insulate the force from illegitimate political pressure; selection of the Director General from a panel with a minimum two year tenure; a two year tenure for operational field officers; separation of investigation from law and order in towns above a population threshold; a Police Establishment Board to decide transfers and postings up to the rank of Deputy Superintendent; a Police Complaints Authority at district and State level to inquire into serious complaints against officers; and a National Security Commission at the Centre. Compliance has been partial and grudging, and that is the honest thing to say about it.

In Paramvir Singh Saini v. Baljit Singh, (2021) 1 SCC 184, decided on 2 December 2020, the Court turned to proof. Recognising that custodial misconduct is denied because it is unrecorded, it directed the installation of closed circuit cameras with night vision and audio at every entry and exit, lock up, corridor, lobby, reception and the station house officer's room, with storage for a defined period, a duty on the station house officer to report and repair faults, and a right in the human rights commissions and the courts to summon the footage. The order shifts the contest from oath against oath to a record, which is the only durable answer to the evidentiary problem in this field.

For full marks, cover: the question has two limbs and the second carries the marks. Define the concept from Sutherland and say what his definition changed; describe the Indian pattern sector by sector with real illustrations; then spend the second half on curbing it, which means the statutes by name and section, the courts on bail and burden, and an honest account of why the conviction rate stays where it is.

The concept and what Sutherland changed

Edwin H. Sutherland gave the field its name in his presidential address to the American Sociological Society in 1939 and worked it out in White Collar Crime in 1949. His definition is that a white collar crime is a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation. Three elements do the work: the actor's status, the occupational setting, and the abuse of a position of trust that the occupation creates.

Two later refinements matter for an Indian answer. Occupational crime is committed by the individual against the employer or the public, such as a bank officer sanctioning a loan against a bribe. Corporate crime is committed by the organisation, for the organisation, such as a company adulterating a drug to protect a margin. The distinction decides who is prosecuted and it is the reason India needed both section 447 of the Companies Act, 2013 and the vicarious liability provisions that go with it.

The Indian pattern

The Santhanam Committee on Prevention of Corruption, constituted in June 1962 and reporting in 1964, is the first official Indian description of the phenomenon. It said that the advance of technology and industrial growth had produced a new class of offences which the ordinary criminal law was not designed to reach, and it named the sectors: industrialists, businessmen, contractors, share pushers, professionals and, importantly, public servants whose cooperation makes the rest possible.

One illustration should be worked rather than merely named. The Satyam Computer Services fraud, disclosed by the chairman's own letter in January 2009, involved falsified cash and bank balances, non existent interest income, an understated liability and an overstated debtor position built up over years and signed off through the audit. It ended in convictions in 2015 under the Indian Penal Code provisions on cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy, because the Companies Act then in force had no offence of fraud adequate to it. Section 447 of the Companies Act, 2013 was the legislative answer.

Why it is hard to prove

The evidentiary problem is structural, and stating it is what separates a good answer from a list. The act is documentary, so proof depends on records the accused controls. There is no complainant, because the loss is spread thinly across taxpayers or consumers who never learn of it. Detection depends on a regulator rather than a victim. The trail is intermediated through companies, trusts and nominees, so proving the beneficial owner is a separate case in itself. Expert evidence is needed and forensic accounting capacity is thin. The accused can fund delay indefinitely, and delay is itself the defence, because in an economic case the witnesses are officials who transfer, retire and forget.

Two currency points belong in this answer and both are checkable. First, the constitutional challenge to the money laundering machinery was rejected in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary v. Union of India, decided on 27 July 2022, which upheld the powers of arrest, attachment, search and the twin conditions for bail, and held the Enforcement Case Information Report is not a first information report so need not be furnished; review petitions are being heard by a three judge Bench on a narrow scope, principally the supply of that report and the reverse burden. Second, and more important as a trap, Union of India v. Ganpati Dealcom Pvt. Ltd., decided on 23 August 2022, which had struck down section 3(2) and section 5 of the unamended benami statute and held the 2016 amendment prospective, was recalled by the Supreme Court on 18 October 2024 and the appeal restored for fresh adjudication. It should not be cited as settled law.

On the substantive law, the leading modern statement of intent is in the money laundering jurisprudence, but the older and cleaner illustration is the disproportionate assets case. Under section 13(1)(b) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, illicit enrichment is proved by showing possession of pecuniary resources disproportionate to known sources of income, and Explanation 1 raises a presumption which the public servant must satisfactorily account for. The device answers the evidentiary problem by shifting the burden once the disproportion is established, and it is the single most effective provision in Indian white collar practice.

An honest assessment

Law is not the binding constraint, and saying so is the mark of a postgraduate answer. India has as much white collar legislation as any comparable jurisdiction. What it lacks is investigative capacity in proportion to the caseload, a trial that finishes within the working life of its witnesses, and consistency in whom it pursues. Selective enforcement is the deepest problem, because a regime that is severe in the statute book and selective in practice produces neither deterrence nor legitimacy.

For full marks, cover: the two schools must be placed in the sequence of criminological thought before they are described, because the question says "in the context of theories of Criminology". Then take each with its founders, its method, its central proposition and its modern descendant, and end with a comparison and an honest criticism of both. The Indian material belongs to the socialist half and should be used there.

Where the two schools sit

Criminological thought moves in identifiable stages, and both of these schools are reactions to what came before them. The pre classical or demonological explanation treated crime as sin or possession. The classical school of Beccaria and Bentham, from Dei delitti e delle pene in 1764, treated the offender as a rational calculator and located the answer in certain, proportionate and prompt punishment. The positivist school of Lombroso, Ferri and Garofalo, from 1876, moved the focus from the act to the actor and looked for the causes of crime in the individual's constitution.

The method is the point. Both men used official crime statistics, mapped them geographically and compared them against the other measurable characteristics of a region: wealth and poverty, population density, literacy, age and sex composition, and season. This is the first systematic use of aggregate data in the study of crime, and it made criminology a quantitative subject a generation before it became a biological one.

The findings were of two kinds. First, the regularity of crime. Quetelet observed that the number of crimes of each kind, and even of murders by each means, varied remarkably little from year to year in a stable society. Second, the distribution of crime. Crime against the person was found to be relatively more frequent in the warmer south and in summer, and crime against property in the colder north and in winter, a pattern later called the thermic law of delinquency.

The criticism is equally straightforward. The school takes official statistics as its raw material, and official statistics record the crime that was reported and registered, not the crime that occurred. The gap between the two, the dark figure, is not random: it is largest exactly where the school's conclusions are strongest, in offences against women, in offences by the powerful and in areas where the police are least trusted. In India the point is easy to demonstrate: after Lalita Kumari v. Government of Uttar Pradesh, (2014) 2 SCC 1, made registration of a first information report mandatory on information disclosing a cognizable offence, recorded crime in several categories rose sharply, and what changed was the recording rather than the conduct.

The socialist school

The socialist or Marxist school explains crime by the economic structure of society and, more radically, explains the criminal law itself by the same structure. Its starting point is in Marx and Engels rather than in any criminologist: Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845, described the demoralisation produced by industrial conditions and treated crime as the earliest and crudest form of the workers' revolt.

The school revived in the 1970s as radical or critical criminology. The New Criminology by Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young, 1973, demanded a criminology that explained not only the criminal act but the making and enforcement of the law that defines it. Richard Quinney's The Social Reality of Crime, 1970, argued that criminal definitions are formulated and applied by the segments of society with the power to shape public policy. William Chambliss's study of vagrancy law showed a criminal category created and re shaped to follow the labour needs of the propertied.

The central proposition, then, is about definition rather than causation. Conduct is not criminal because it is harmful; it is criminal because it has been defined as such, and definitions are made by those with the power to make them. Hence the school's characteristic observation that the conduct which does the greatest social harm, unsafe workplaces, adulterated food, environmental damage, financial manipulation, is generally handled by regulators and compounding, while the conduct of the poor is handled by police and prisons.

The prison decisions carry the argument further. In Sunil Batra v. Delhi Administration, (1978) 4 SCC 494, and again in the second Sunil Batra petition, (1980) 3 SCC 488, begun on a convict's letter about the torture of a fellow prisoner, the Court held that a prisoner does not lose his fundamental rights at the gate, curtailed solitary confinement and bar fetters, and issued directions on grievance redress and visits by district judges. In State of Gujarat v. High Court of Gujarat, (1998) 7 SCC 392, the Court held that prisoners made to labour must be paid reasonable wages, since unpaid compelled labour is forbidden by Article 23. Each decision corrects a practice in which the institution reproduced the hierarchy outside it.

Comparison

The criticism of the socialist school must be given honestly. It explains variation between social orders far better than variation within one: it does not tell us why, among two workers in the same factory with the same wage, one commits a burglary and the other does not. Crime did not disappear in the socialist states, which is a serious empirical difficulty for the stronger version of the thesis. And its account of law is at times conspiratorial, treating every criminal prohibition as class instrument when many, such as the law against rape or against causing death by negligence, are not usefully explained that way.

Conclusion. The two schools are complementary rather than rival, and that is the answer's best closing point. The cartographic school supplies criminology with its method and its most durable finding, that crime is patterned and therefore predictable in the aggregate; the socialist school supplies its most uncomfortable question, which is who decides what counts as crime in the first place. Read together they explain the Indian position better than either alone: our statistics show a stable pattern of registered crime, and our jails hold the class that the statistics are collected about, while the conduct Baxi called privileged class deviance is handled elsewhere.

Sutherland and Cressey's definition marks out the ground. Criminology is the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social phenomenon, and it includes within its scope the processes of making laws, breaking laws and reacting towards the breaking of laws. Those three processes are not equally amenable to scientific treatment, and much of the confusion in this debate comes from arguing about the whole when the difficulty lies in one part.

The case that criminology is a science

It has a defined subject matter and a systematic method. Crime, criminals, victims, criminal law and the criminal justice system are observable phenomena about which data are collected continuously. The cartographic school established statistical study in the 1830s, and the modern subject uses survey methods, longitudinal cohort studies, controlled trials and meta analysis.

It generates testable propositions, and some have been tested and rejected. Lombroso's claim that the born criminal is identifiable by physical stigmata was a scientific claim in the proper sense, and Charles Goring's The English Convict, 1913, tested it by comparing three thousand convicts with control groups and found no such anthropological criminal type. A discipline in which a central claim can be and was falsified by evidence is behaving as a science.

The case against

First, the subject matter is legally defined and therefore unstable. The chemist's oxygen is the same in every jurisdiction and in every century; the criminologist's crime is whatever the legislature of the day says it is. Adultery was an offence in India until Joseph Shine v. Union of India, (2019) 3 SCC 39, struck down section 497 of the Indian Penal Code; consensual homosexual conduct between adults was an offence until Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, (2018) 10 SCC 1, read down section 377; attempted suicide effectively ceased to be punishable with section 115 of the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017. In each case the conduct did not change and the crime rate did. A dependent variable that the legislature can abolish is not a natural kind.

Second, the data are systematically incomplete. The dark figure of unreported and unrecorded crime is large, and it is not randomly distributed: it is greatest for sexual offences, for domestic violence, for crimes by the powerful and in communities that do not trust the police. Every generalisation built on official statistics therefore carries an unmeasured bias, and victimisation surveys, which exist to correct it, have their own recall and definition problems.

Resolving the argument

The resolution is to abandon the physics model, which was never the right standard. Economics, demography, epidemiology and meteorology are all sciences whose subject matter is complex, whose predictions are probabilistic and whose experiments are mostly natural rather than designed. Criminology sits comfortably in that company. It is a social science: systematic, empirical and self correcting, but predicting distributions rather than individual events.

The proper claim is therefore modest and defensible: criminology is a science of aggregates and a discipline of judgment in the individual case. It can say with confidence what proportion of a cohort will reoffend and which places will produce most burglaries next year. It cannot say whether this defendant will offend again, and the honest practitioner should say so, because sentencing courts are entitled to know the limit of the instrument.

Testing the claim against the four requirements

The Supreme Court acquitted all three. It found the investigation defective at almost every stage that mattered: the collection and sealing of samples was not proved, the chain of custody from the scene to the laboratory was left to inference, and the safeguards that give a profile its value were not observed. It held that a report of deoxyribonucleic acid analysis is opinion evidence within section 45 of the Evidence Act, that its probative value varies with the quality of the collection and handling that preceded it, and that a court must satisfy itself of that foundation before treating it as conclusive. The judgment is the clearest available demonstration that scientific technique does not become scientific evidence unless the process that produced it was itself disciplined, which is the same standard the discipline must apply to its own data.

For full marks, cover: what the theory says and, more importantly, what it was a reaction against, since it exists only because the single factor theories failed; its chief exponents with their studies; a worked classification of the factors with Indian illustrations; then the criticism, which is severe and which Sutherland himself made; and finally the point most candidates miss, that Indian sentencing law has adopted the multiple factor approach by statute and by judgment even though criminology has largely abandoned it as theory.

What it is, and what it replaced

The multiple factor theory holds that crime is the product of a plurality of factors acting together, that the combination differs from offender to offender, and that no single factor is either necessary or sufficient to produce criminal conduct. There is no master cause; there is a constellation.

Its exponents

Cesare Lombroso's own successor supplied the first structured version. Enrico Ferri, in Criminal Sociology, classified the causes of crime into three groups: anthropological, meaning the constitution of the offender; physical or telluric, meaning climate, soil, season and geography; and social, meaning density of population, religion, family, education, industry and the state of the law. His law of criminal saturation, that a given social environment with given individual and physical conditions produces a determinate quantity of crime, is multiple factor thinking before the name existed.

William Healy's The Individual Delinquent, 1915, is the first great empirical statement. Working with juvenile offenders in Chicago, Healy took full case histories and found that delinquency in each child was the outcome of a distinct combination of mental, physical and social conditions. His method, the individual case study, became the model for the pre sentence report.

The factors, classified

Biological and constitutional. Age, since offending peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood in every society measured; sex, since recorded offending is overwhelmingly male; physique and health; and inherited predispositions, on which the honest position is that twin and adoption studies show a modest heritable component in antisocial behaviour and nothing resembling a criminal gene.

Psychological. Intelligence and its limits, personality disorder and psychopathy, emotional deprivation in early childhood, impulsivity and poor self control, and mental illness, which criminology consistently finds to be a far smaller contributor than public opinion assumes.

Familial. Broken or conflicted homes, parental criminality, inconsistent or brutal discipline, neglect, and the absence of supervision. Healy and Burt both found family disorganisation the single most frequent condition, which is why it recurs in every probation report written in India today.

The criticism, which is severe

Sutherland, the most important criminologist of the century, rejected the approach outright, and this is the point that separates a first class answer. His objection was that a list of factors is not a theory. A theory states a general proposition that explains why the factors operate, and it must meet the tests of generality and internal consistency. The multiple factor approach explains everything after the event and predicts nothing before it. Sutherland's own answer, differential association, set out in nine propositions in the 1939 and 1947 editions of his Principles of Criminology, holds that criminal behaviour is learned in intimate personal groups, and that a person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favourable to violation of law over definitions unfavourable to it. Whether or not that is right, it is a theory in a sense that a list of one hundred and seventy conditions is not.

Where the theory survives: Indian sentencing law

Criminology largely moved on, but law did not, and Indian statutes have written the multiple factor approach into sentencing. The Probation of Offenders Act, 1958 turns on it: under section 4 a court may release an offender on probation of good conduct having regard to the circumstances of the case including the nature of the offence and the character of the offender, and it is required to consider the report of the probation officer, which is nothing but a multi factor case history; section 6 goes further and forbids the imprisonment of an offender under twenty one for a non capital, non life offence unless the court records reasons after considering that report.

The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 does the same for the child in conflict with law. Under section 15, before a child of sixteen to eighteen alleged to have committed a heinous offence can be tried as an adult, the Board must conduct a preliminary assessment of the child's mental and physical capacity to commit the offence, the ability to understand its consequences and the circumstances in which the offence was allegedly committed, with the assistance of psychologists or experts. That is a statutory multiple factor inquiry.

Conclusion. The multiple factor theory is an accurate description of reality and a poor theory, and the two statements are not in conflict. Crime plainly does arise from converging biological, psychological, familial and social conditions, and Burt, Healy and the Gluecks proved as much; but a catalogue that assigns no weights, states no mechanism and can be refuted by nothing is not an explanation, which is what Sutherland and Cohen said. Its enduring value in India is not explanatory but practical: it is the intellectual basis of the probation report, of the preliminary assessment under section 15 of the Juvenile Justice Act, and of the mitigation material that Manoj now requires before a court may pass a sentence of death.

Section 3 is the engine. The appropriate Government may appoint a commission if it is of opinion that it is necessary, and shall appoint one if a resolution to that effect is passed by each House of Parliament or of the State Legislature. The appointment is by notification in the Official Gazette and must define the terms of reference. A commission may be of one or more members, with a chairman where there are several. Section 3(4) requires the appropriate Government to lay the report before the House together with a memorandum of the action taken, within six months of submission. That six month obligation is the only real accountability in the Act and it is routinely honoured late.

Section 4 gives the commission the powers of a civil court while trying a suit under the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, in respect of summoning and enforcing attendance and examining on oath, requiring the discovery and production of documents, receiving evidence on affidavit, requisitioning public records, issuing commissions for the examination of witnesses or documents and any other prescribed matter.

Sections 8B and 8C are the natural justice provisions and are the ones most litigated. Under section 8B, if at any stage the commission considers it necessary to inquire into the conduct of any person, or is of opinion that his reputation is likely to be prejudicially affected, it must give him a reasonable opportunity of being heard and of producing evidence in his defence. Under section 8C, such a person, and any person whose evidence is recorded, has the right to cross examine witnesses and to be represented by a legal practitioner. Section 8A saves the inquiry from a change in the commission's constitution and section 8 leaves the procedure otherwise to the commission.

The remaining sections are short. Section 7 provides for a commission to cease to exist when so notified, and section 6A protects secret manufacturing processes. Section 9 protects action taken in good faith and section 10 makes members and staff public servants. Section 10A punishes acts calculated to bring the commission or its members into disrepute with simple imprisonment up to six months or fine or both. Section 11 applies the Act's protections to other inquiring authorities and section 12 is the rule making power.

The Supreme Court upheld both. It held that the Act is valid; that classification for the purpose of an inquiry into a definite matter of public importance is permissible; and, most importantly for criminology, that a commission of inquiry is a fact finding body which does not decide any dispute, gives no judgment, imposes no liability and creates no rights or obligations. Its report is not binding on anybody, is not enforceable, and its findings cannot be treated as a finding of guilt. The commission is an instrument of information for the government, and the government remains free to act on it, to reject it or to do nothing.

Two consequences follow, and both are examinable. First, because there is no adjudication, the ordinary rule against a person being tried twice is not attracted, and a criminal prosecution may follow a commission's findings on the same facts. Second, because there is no adjudication, an adverse finding against a named individual is a serious injury without a remedy, which is exactly why sections 8B and 8C were inserted in 1971.

Illustrations

The Srikrishna Commission is the local illustration a Mumbai examiner expects. Appointed by the Government of Maharashtra by notification of 25 January 1993 to inquire into the riots in Bombay in December 1992 and January 1993, it was wound up by the succeeding State Government in 1996 and revived only after public protest and judicial displeasure, with its terms of reference enlarged. It examined 502 witnesses and 2,903 exhibits and reported on 16 February 1998, naming police officers and political actors and recommending action in a large number of cases. Successive Governments have implemented it in part at most. It illustrates every feature of the Act: the government's control over life and terms of reference, the thoroughness a commission can achieve, and the emptiness of a report nobody must act on.

It found a chain of failure rather than a single culprit. The supplier had obtained a repacking licence without the diligence the Food and Drug Administration was required to exercise. The hospital's purchase machinery bought on price without regard to quality. The pharmacology committee which cleared the preparation had been influenced by payment. The drug testing laboratory was inadequate to the task. And political interference in the Food and Drug Administration was systemic: the Commission recorded that a number of politicians, including serving and former health ministers, had interfered in its working to protect manufacturers of substandard drugs, and it drew what it called the irresistible inference of corruption against the then Health Minister.

Assessment

The honest criticism of the Act is that it produces knowledge and not consequences. The government chooses whether to appoint, defines the terms of reference, controls the extensions, and decides what to do with the report; the commission has no power to punish, its findings bind nobody after Dalmia, and section 6 immunity means the evidence gathered cannot ordinarily be used in a subsequent prosecution. It is therefore an instrument that can be used honestly, as at J.J. Hospital, and can equally be used to postpone a political difficulty until public attention has moved on.

Three reforms follow. Statutory time limits with reasons for every extension, so that a Liberhan cannot happen. A binding obligation to place the action taken memorandum before the House within the six months section 3(4) already requires, with a debate. And a standing mechanism for implementation, since a recommendation nobody owns is a recommendation nobody executes.

For full marks, cover: three notes of about twelve and a half marks each. On the Prevention of Corruption Act, the scheme of offences by section with the 2018 changes named, and the two procedural gates in sections 17A and 19. On medical deviance, the forms it takes, then the civil, criminal and disciplinary controls, each with its case. On the Press Council, the Act's own sections, then the single most important limitation on the body, which is that it can only censure and only over the print medium.

(a) Prevention of Corruption Act

The Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 consolidated the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1947 and sections 161 to 165A of the Indian Penal Code, which it repealed. One consequence is worth stating at the outset because it surprises candidates: the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 contains no general offence of a public servant taking a bribe. That subject belongs entirely to this Act.

Sections 9 and 10 create corporate liability. A commercial organisation is punishable with fine where a person associated with it gives a bribe to obtain business, subject to a defence that the organisation had adequate procedures in place; and section 10 punishes the director, manager or officer with whose consent or connivance the offence was committed, with three to seven years and fine.

Section 11 punishes a public servant who obtains any undue advantage without consideration from a person concerned in a proceeding or business transacted by him, with six months to five years. Section 12 punishes abetment with three to seven years.

Two procedural gates matter more in practice than the offences. Section 19 requires previous sanction of the appropriate authority before a court takes cognizance of an offence under sections 7, 11, 13 and 15 against a public servant. Section 17A, inserted in 2018, goes further back and forbids a police officer from conducting any enquiry, inquiry or investigation into an offence relatable to a recommendation made or decision taken by a public servant in discharge of official functions without previous approval of the appropriate Government or competent authority. No approval is needed where the person is arrested on the spot accepting an undue advantage, and the authority must decide within three months, extendable by one month for recorded reasons.

(b) Medical professionals and deviance

Professional deviance in medicine is the abuse of a relationship in which the patient cannot check what is being done to him. The information asymmetry is total, the transaction is often urgent, and the professional's own body regulates him. That combination is why the medical profession appears in every syllabus on privileged class deviance.

The forms are well documented in India. Negligence and the failure to maintain standards. Refusal of emergency treatment. Unnecessary investigation and surgery driven by the economics of a corporate hospital. Cut practice, the payment of commission for referrals, which is the profession's characteristic corruption. Prescription of a brand for a consideration. Sex determination and sex selective abortion. Trade in organs. Issue of false medical certificates and false post mortem findings, which is where medical deviance meets police deviance. Adulteration and supply of substandard drugs, which is what the Lentin Commission exposed at the J.J. Hospital in 1986. And deviance in the profession's own gatekeeping, through capitation and admission fraud.

The evidentiary swing back came in V. Kishan Rao v. Nikhil Super Speciality Hospital, (2010) 5 SCC 513, where a woman was treated for typhoid while suffering from malaria and died. The Court held that expert evidence is not invariably required in a consumer complaint, that res ipsa loquitur can apply where the negligence is apparent, and expressly held that the direction in Martin F. D'Souza v. Mohd. Ishfaq, (2009) 3 SCC 1, referring every complaint to an expert before notice, was given per incuriam and was not good law. Kusum Sharma v. Batra Hospital, (2010) 3 SCC 480, then collected the principles governing the standard of care.

Two further cases complete the picture. In Poonam Verma v. Ashwin Patel, (1996) 4 SCC 332, a doctor registered in homoeopathy treated a patient with allopathic drugs and the patient died; the Court held that practising a system one is not qualified in is negligence per se, actionable without proof of the standard of care. In Parmanand Katara v. Union of India, (1989) 4 SCC 286, the Court held that every doctor, at a government hospital or otherwise, has a professional obligation to give immediate medical aid to a person in an emergency, that no legal formality can be pleaded to postpone it, and that the law does not obstruct him. Section 397 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 has now given that principle statutory form for victims of listed offences.

Its composition under section 5 is designed to keep it out of government hands. It consists of a Chairman and twenty eight other members. The Chairman is nominated by a committee of the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and one member elected by the Council, and has by convention been a retired Supreme Court judge. Of the twenty eight, thirteen are working journalists of whom six are editors, six represent owners and managers of big, medium and small newspapers, one represents news agencies, three are nominated by the University Grants Commission, the Bar Council of India and the Sahitya Akademi, and five are Members of Parliament.

Its functions under section 13(2) go well beyond adjudicating complaints. They include helping newspapers maintain their independence, building a code of conduct, fostering a sense of responsibility, keeping under review developments likely to restrict the supply of news, reviewing foreign assistance to Indian newspapers, and concerning itself with concentration of ownership which may affect the independence of the Press.

The limitation that matters most is jurisdictional. The Act speaks of newspapers and news agencies. Television, radio and digital news are outside the Council's reach, and they are where most Indian news is now consumed. Broadcast content is governed instead by the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995 and by self regulatory bodies of the industry, and digital news by the rules made under the Information Technology Act, 2000. A regulator of print alone, in 2026, regulates a minority of the problem.

The paid news episode shows both the Council's usefulness and its weakness. A two member sub committee of the Council, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and K. Sreenivas Reddy, investigated the practice of selling editorial space as news, particularly during elections, and produced a report of about thirty six thousand words naming publications. On 30 July 2010 the Council adopted a heavily abridged version, roughly a tenth of the original, from which the specific names had been removed, and the full report reached the public by other means. A body that can only censure, and that is composed in substantial part of the owners it must censure, will find it difficult to name them.

Conclusion. The three notes describe three regulatory styles and their characteristic failures. The Prevention of Corruption Act is the criminal style, strengthened in 2018 in its offences and simultaneously narrowed by the section 17A gate now before a larger Bench. Medical deviance is controlled through a mixture of consumer, criminal and self regulatory law, and the abeyance of the 2023 conduct regulations three weeks after notification shows which of the three is weakest. The Press Council is the self regulatory style at its purest, with a composition that protects independence, a power confined to censure, and no jurisdiction at all over the medium where the abuse now lives.