Indian Administration Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The Aitchison Commission (the Public Service Commission of 1886) recommended the classification of the civil services in India into the Imperial Civil Service, the Provincial Civil Service and the Subordinate Civil Service, that is (i), (iii) and (iv).

The Indian Administrative Service (ii) came into being after independence and was not part of the Aitchison Commission's scheme, so the options that include it are wrong. The first option is correct.

Answer: B

Both statements are correct, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A), according to the key. The Parliament does have an overseeing function over the Executive, exercised through questions, debates, motions and committees, and the Comptroller and Auditor General is described as the eyes and ears of the Parliament, since he audits government accounts for it.

The reason names only one instrument of the overseeing function, and the function itself is not due to it, so (R) is not the full explanation of (A). The second option is correct.

Answer: C

The statement that the Central Secretariat is headed by the Cabinet Secretary is not correct. The Central Secretariat is made up of the secretariats of the ministries and departments, each ministry being headed by a Secretary, while the Cabinet Secretariat is a separate body headed by the Cabinet Secretary.

The other statements are accurate: the Secretariat is a policy-making and, in certain cases, executive agency, it is a policy-advisory body, and it is the collective name for all the secretariat departments of the Government of India. So the third option is the answer.

Answer: B

The key gives the Northcote-Trevelyan Report as the source of the statement about manning the civil service with the most promising young men through a competing examination. The Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 recommended entry by open competitive examination for the civil service, as against patronage.

The Appleby Report was on Indian public administration (1953), and the First Administrative Reforms Commission Report is of 1966-70. The Macaulay Report of 1854 on the Indian Civil Service also favoured a competitive literary examination, so a reviewer may wish to check the exact source of the quotation. The answer follows the official key.

Answer: B

The key gives statements (i), (ii) and (iii). The Prime Minister's Office is regarded as the think-tank of the Prime Minister, it is an extra-constitutional body, since the Constitution does not mention it, and it was given the status of a department under the Government of India (Transaction of Business) Rules.

Statement (iv) is not correct, since the PMO is headed administratively by the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister and not by the Cabinet Secretary, who heads the Cabinet Secretariat. So the second option is correct.

Answer: D

The statement that only a committed bureaucracy could bring about the social transformation envisaged in the Five-Year Plans and in progressive legislation was made by Indira Gandhi, in the context of the call for a committed bureaucracy in the early 1970s.

Jawaharlal Nehru, V.P. Singh and Chandrashekhar are not credited with this statement in the key, so the fourth option is correct.

Answer: A

Both statements are correct and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). The view is that specialists are not fit for the post of Secretary of a government department, which needs a general administrative view, and the reason offered is that specialists possess a narrow vision.

This is the argument of the generalist school, so the reason supports the assertion, and the first option is the answer.

Answer: D

The Cabinet in India is part of the Council of Ministers, is institutionalised by usage and is the policy making institution at the highest level, so the code is (ii), (iii) and (iv).

The Cabinet is not a constitutional body in the original text. The word entered the Constitution only through the 44th Amendment in 1978, and the Cabinet has grown by convention. Hence the codes that call it a constitutional body, which include (i), are rejected.

Answer: B

Both statements are correct, but the Reason is not the correct explanation of the Assertion, as the key gives.

Under the colonial raj, administration was mainly regulatory, and concerned with the maintenance of law and order and the collection of revenue, so (A) is correct. As a matter of policy the sensitive positions were given to British officers, so (R) is also correct. But that fact tells who held posts, and does not by itself explain why the administration was regulatory in nature, so the first code is rejected.

Answer: B

The chronological order of the reports is the Gopalaswamy Ayyangar Report (1949), the Gorwala Report (1951), the first Appleby Report (1953) and the First Administrative Reforms Commission Report (1966-70). The code is (i), (iii), (ii), (iv).

The first code places Appleby before Gorwala, and the last two put the ARC report earlier than the earlier reports, so each of them is wrong. The reports of the late 1940s and 1950s were the first attempts to review the Indian administration after independence, and the ARC of the 1960s was the major review. Putting them in their years gives the order at once.