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Criminology
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LLM · Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration
2015 Examination
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First published on munotes.in on 13 August 2026.
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Model answers written and edited by the munotes.in editorial desk.
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The University does not publish an official answer key for this paper. The answers in this volume are model answers, written to show how a full-mark answer is built. They are a study aid, not an authority on what an examiner marked.
The question paper reproduced here is the paper as set by the University of Mumbai at the 2015 examination.
The law in these answers is stated as at August 2026, and four points date most textbooks on this subject. Section 17A of the Prevention of Corruption Act survived a split verdict in Centre for Public Interest Litigation v. Union of India, 2026 INSC 55, in January 2026 and stands referred to a larger Bench, so it remains in force. The four to ten year punishment in section 13(2) was raised not by the 2018 amendment but by the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013 on 16 January 2014. Union of India v. Ganpati Dealcom was recalled on 18 October 2024 and is not citable. And the Maharashtra Lokayukta Act, 2022, which covers the Chief Minister, had assent and was still not in force at the time of writing.
Contents
The questions below are the paper as the University of Mumbai set it at the 2015 examination, in the order it was set.
MarksPage
The Paper as Set
The questions in this volume are the questions asked at the 2015 examination, reproduced as the University of Mumbai set them, in the order it set them. Nothing has been reworded, added or left out. Only the answers are ours. See the original question paper.
Duration 3 hours · Total marks 100 · 7 questions answered
How to use this volume
Solve the paper first, under exam conditions and against the clock. Then read the answers here and mark your own. Reading a solution before attempting the question feels productive and teaches very little, because recognising an answer is not the same as being able to write one.
SECTION I
Q.P. Code 27184, BB-Con. 1554-15. Attempt any four questions, all questions carry equal marks
any four of seven · 100 Marks
1.Write short notes on Any Two[25]
- (a) Public accounts committee
- (b) Victimology.
- (c) Police Deviance.
Answer
For full marks, cover: three notes, of which the examiner reads two. On the Public Accounts Committee, the rule under which it is constituted, its strength, the Opposition convention, and above all what it can and cannot do, since a note that only lists its composition earns half. On victimology, the shift from the offender to the victim, the statutory scheme now in the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita by section number, and the three decisions that made compensation a duty rather than a discretion. On police deviance, a working classification, then the constitutional and statutory controls, each attached to the case that produced it.
(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.
Its function is to examine the appropriation accounts and the finance accounts of the Union, together with the reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General on them. Those reports reach it because Article 151(1) requires the Comptroller and Auditor General's reports on the accounts of the Union to be submitted to the President, who causes them to be laid before each House. The committee satisfies itself that the money shown as spent was legally available for the purpose to which it was applied, that the spending conformed to the authority governing it, and that every re appropriation was made within the rules.
The Comptroller and Auditor General is therefore its indispensable partner, and the office is protected for that reason. Article 148 secures the appointment and removal of the Comptroller and Auditor General in the manner of a Supreme Court judge and charges the salary on the Consolidated Fund, Article 149 leaves the duties and powers to Parliament, and the Comptroller and Auditor General's (Duties, Powers and Conditions of Service) Act, 1971 works them out.
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).
What the committee cannot do matters as much as what it can, and this is where marks are won. It works after the money is spent, so its scrutiny is by definition a post mortem. It examines the executive through officials, principally the Secretary as the accounting officer, and it is not the forum in which a Minister is called to account. It does not question policy; it asks whether policy was executed within the sanction Parliament gave. Its findings are recommendations, answered by the Government's action taken notes, and nothing in the rules compels compliance. It has no power to punish and cannot itself launch a prosecution.
Two further limits are practical. The volume of audit material vastly exceeds what twenty two members can examine in a year, so the committee is necessarily selective, and selection is itself a political act. And the committee is not immune from the divisions of the House: its own report can fail, as happened when a majority of members declined to adopt the Chairman's draft on the 2G spectrum allocations in 2011, which left the committee's authority on the very matter of greatest public interest in doubt.
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.
Its central claim is a correction to classical criminology. A system organised around the offender treats the victim as evidence: a witness to be summoned, examined and released. Victimology insists that the person injured has interests of their own in the process, which are at least the interest in being informed, in being heard, in being protected and in being compensated.
The idea of secondary victimisation is the field's most useful contribution to Indian practice. The first injury is done by the offender. The second is done by the process, through delay, hostile cross examination, repeated identification, insensitive medical examination and the leakage of identity. On any honest account of Indian trials, the second injury is the one the system controls and the one it most often inflicts.
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.
Three decisions turned these words into a duty. In Ankush Shivaji Gaikwad v. State of Maharashtra, (2013) 6 SCC 770, the appellant's conviction for murder was altered to culpable homicide not amounting to murder, and the Supreme Court took the occasion to consider compensation under what was then section 357 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. It held that although the power is discretionary, the duty to apply the mind to it is not: in every case the court must consider whether to award compensation and, if it declines, must record its reasons. A provision that courts may ignore altogether, the Court said, would leave the victim forgotten in the very system enacted for their protection.
In Suresh v. State of Haryana, (2015) 2 SCC 227, decided on 28 November 2014, the question was timing. Relatives of the deceased in a kidnapping and murder case had received nothing while the case ground on. The Court held that compensation under the victim compensation scheme may be awarded at any stage once the victim is identified, that interim compensation may be directed, and that the award does not wait upon conviction. It went further and set a benchmark figure for the State in cases of that gravity, which is why the decision is cited whenever a scheme is pleaded to be illusory.
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.
(c) Police deviance
Police deviance means conduct by police officers that departs from the legal and ethical standards of the office. It is useful to divide it, because the controls differ. Corruption is the use of the office for private gain, from the collection at the station to organised protection. Abuse of force covers custodial violence, torture to extract confession and the extra judicial killing described in the euphemism of an encounter. Abuse of process covers refusal to register a first information report, false or padded charges, illegal detention, planted recoveries and the manipulation of case diaries. Occupational deviance covers absence, intoxication and the trade in postings. Political subservience, the willingness to act as an instrument of whoever is in office, is the deviance that produces all the others, because it removes the fear of consequence.
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 D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal, (1997) 1 SCC 416, the Court moved from remedy to prevention. On a letter from the Legal Aid Services, West Bengal, about deaths in custody, it issued eleven requirements binding on every agency with the power to arrest: an accurate, visible identification of the arresting officers; a memo of arrest attested by a relative or a respectable local person and countersigned by the arrestee; a right to have one friend or relative informed; entry of the arrest in a diary; examination of injuries at the time of arrest; medical examination every forty eight hours by an approved doctor; copies of the documents to the illaqa magistrate; and the arrestee's right to meet a lawyer during interrogation. Failure to comply was made punishable as contempt. Most of these requirements are now statutory.
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.
Statutory control has since caught up in part. The arrest safeguards 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, an inquiry that is in addition to any police investigation. In Arnesh Kumar v. State of Bihar, (2014) 8 SCC 273, arising from an automatic arrest in a dowry harassment complaint, the Court held that arrest is not to follow merely because an offence is registered, directed police officers to satisfy themselves of the necessity of arrest by reference to the statutory checklist and to forward reasons to the magistrate, and made the failure a matter for departmental action and contempt. In Lalita Kumari v. Government of Uttar Pradesh, (2014) 2 SCC 1, five judges held registration of a first information report mandatory where the information discloses a cognizable offence, closing the discretion under which stations had refused to record complaints.
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.
Conclusion. The three notes describe three different responses to the same difficulty, that power in a democracy tends to be used for purposes other than those for which it was given. The Public Accounts Committee answers it through the purse and after the event, and its weakness is that it can only report. Victimology answers it by asking who was actually injured, and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita has now made compensation a scheme that does not wait for a conviction. Police deviance is answered by the courts, because the political branches have not answered it, and the movement from Nilabati Behera to Paramvir Singh Saini is a movement from compensating the proved wrong to recording the evidence that would prove it.
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