Political Philosophy
Assent, Refuse or Reduce: The Three Things Article 113 Lets the House of the People Do
7 October 2026 · 15 min read
The budget is the standard illustration of legislative control over the executive. A government must come to the elected House each year for the money it intends to spend; the House examines the demands, and what it will not grant the government cannot spend. On that account the annual exercise is the point at which the power of the purse, held by the representatives, is set against the power of administration, held by the Ministry.
The six articles that contain the provisions — Articles 112 to 117, grouped in Part V under the heading "Procedure in Financial Matters" — do not describe that relationship. They describe a narrower one, and they do so in terms. Across those six articles the Constitution gives the House of the People no power to propose expenditure, no power to increase any expenditure proposed, and no power to move it from one head to another. What it gives is a power to withhold. The question worth asking is not whether that is a weak form of control — in one direction it is an absolute form — but why the framers thought control over money should be exclusively negative.
The estimates arrive already divided
Article 112(1) requires the President to cause to be laid before both Houses, for every financial year, "a statement of the estimated receipts and expenditure of the Government of India for that year", which the Part calls the annual financial statement. Clause (2) then requires the estimates of expenditure to show separately the sums required to meet expenditure "described by this Constitution as expenditure charged upon the Consolidated Fund of India" and the sums required to meet "other expenditure proposed to be made from the Consolidated Fund of India".
That division is made before the House sees the document, and it is made by the Constitution rather than by the Ministry. Clause (3) lists what falls on the charged side: the emoluments and allowances of the President and other expenditure relating to his office; the salaries and allowances of the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the Council of States and the Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the House of the People; debt charges for which the Government of India is liable, including interest, sinking fund charges and redemption charges, and other expenditure relating to the raising of loans and the service and redemption of debt; the salaries, allowances and pensions payable to or in respect of Judges of the Supreme Court, together with the pensions of Judges of the Federal Court and of Judges of the High Courts described in sub-clause (d)(iii); the salary, allowances and pension of the Comptroller and Auditor-General; "any sums required to satisfy any judgment, decree or award of any court or arbitral tribunal"; and, by sub-clause (g), "any other expenditure declared by this Constitution or by Parliament by law to be so charged".
The Constitution makes further declarations of its own elsewhere. Article 146(3) charges the administrative expenses of the Supreme Court, including all salaries, allowances and pensions of its officers and servants, upon the Consolidated Fund of India. Article 148(6) does the same for the office of the Comptroller and Auditor-General. Article 322 charges the expenses of the Union and State Public Service Commissions on the Consolidated Fund of India or of the State as the case may be. Article 275(1) charges on the Consolidated Fund of India such sums as Parliament may by law provide as grants-in-aid of the revenues of States determined to be in need of assistance; Article 273 charges the grants payable to four named States in lieu of any share of the net proceeds of export duty on jute and jute products; and Article 293(2) charges any sums required for loans made by the Government of India to a State. Article 229(3) performs the same operation for a High Court on the Consolidated Fund of the State.
What is not submitted to the vote
Article 113(1) states the consequence. "So much of the estimates as relates to expenditure charged upon the Consolidated Fund of India shall not be submitted to the vote of Parliament, but nothing in this clause shall be construed as preventing the discussion in either House of Parliament of any of those estimates."
The sentence is built in two halves, and the second half is as deliberate as the first. The charged expenditure is removed from the vote and expressly left within the debate. A House may examine the figure, criticise it, and record whatever it thinks of it, and cannot reduce it by a rupee. The Constitution therefore distinguishes between two things that are easily run together — the capacity of an assembly to form and state a view, and its capacity to make that view operative. On the charged items it preserves the first and withdraws the second.
That distinction is the one the Constitution uses whenever it wants a payment made irrespective of the political composition of the House. A salary that cannot be reduced by a vote is a salary whose holder owes nothing to the majority that would have reduced it. The list in Article 112(3) is, read in that light, largely an independence provision: the President, the presiding officers of both Houses, the Judges of the Supreme Court, and the Comptroller and Auditor-General, each of whom has a function to perform against the Government of the day or against the majority that sustains it.
Two entries on the list are not of that kind, and they are the more interesting ones. Debt charges under sub-clause (c) are charged because they are not discretionary: the obligation was contracted earlier, by an earlier Ministry with the authority of an earlier House, and the money is owed whether or not the present House approves of the borrowing. Sub-clause (f) does the same work for adjudicated liability. Any sums required to satisfy a judgment, decree or award of any court or arbitral tribunal are charged, which means that a decree against the Union is not a demand for a grant. A litigant who succeeds against the Government does not depend on the House voting the money, and a majority that dislikes the decree cannot defeat it by declining to fund it. The money must still be appropriated by law — Article 114(3) permits no withdrawal otherwise, and where the sum exceeds the figure in the statement already laid, Article 115 requires a further statement, which Article 115(2) carries back through Articles 112, 113 and 114 and therefore keeps on the charged side of the division. What Article 112(3)(f) withdraws is not the need for an appropriation but the need for a vote. That is a provision about the enforceability of judgments, placed among the provisions on financial procedure.
Three verbs, and no fourth
Article 113(2) deals with the remainder. "So much of the said estimates as relates to other expenditure shall be submitted in the form of demands for grants to the House of the People, and the House of the People shall have power to assent, or to refuse to assent, to any demand, or to assent to any demand subject to a reduction of the amount specified therein."
The powers are enumerated, and the enumeration is complete. The House may assent. It may refuse to assent. It may assent subject to a reduction. There is no fourth verb. The clause confers no power to assent subject to an increase, no power to transfer an amount from one demand to another, and no power to attach a condition to a grant other than a reduction of its amount. The House is given a decision on each demand as the demand stands.
Article 113(3) closes the other end. "No demand for a grant shall be made except on the recommendation of the President." No member may bring a demand before the House; the House cannot place a head of expenditure on its own order paper. The whole of the initiative in expenditure is therefore executive, and the whole of the response is a choice among assent, refusal and reduction. Articles 203(2) and 203(3) reproduce both clauses for a State, with the Legislative Assembly in place of the House of the People and the Governor in place of the President.
The Appropriation Bill removes what remains
Even a House confined to three verbs could achieve something by amendment at the next stage, and Article 114 forecloses that. Clause (1) requires the introduction, as soon as may be after the grants have been made, of a Bill to provide for the appropriation out of the Consolidated Fund of India of all moneys required to meet the grants so made and the charged expenditure, "but not exceeding in any case the amount shown in the statement previously laid before Parliament". The charged expenditure that could not be reduced in the estimates therefore cannot be enlarged in the Bill either. The statement laid by the President operates as a ceiling on it.
Clause (2) then provides that no amendment shall be proposed to such a Bill in either House which will have the effect of varying the amount or altering the destination of any grant so made, or of varying the amount of any charged expenditure, "and the decision of the person presiding as to whether an amendment is inadmissible under this clause shall be final". The grants settle the figures and the Appropriation Bill may not disturb them; whether a particular amendment would disturb them is a question the clause gives to the Chair and declares closed. What the word "final" does to the jurisdiction of a court is a separate question, and these articles do not answer it; Article 122(1) provides only that the validity of proceedings in Parliament shall not be called in question on the ground of any alleged irregularity of procedure. Clause (3) completes the circuit from the other side: subject to Articles 115 and 116, no money shall be withdrawn from the Consolidated Fund of India except under appropriation made by law passed in accordance with Article 114. The executive cannot spend without the law, and the law cannot be rearranged by the House that passes it.
The same asymmetry outside the estimates
The pattern is not confined to the annual exercise. Article 117(1) requires the recommendation of the President for the introduction or moving of any Bill or amendment making provision for the matters in sub-clauses (a) to (f) of Article 110(1) — taxation; the regulation of borrowing or of guarantees; the custody of the Consolidated Fund or the Contingency Fund and payments into or withdrawals from them; appropriation; the declaring or increasing of charged expenditure; and the receipt, custody or issue of public money or the audit of the accounts of the Union or of a State — and forbids the introduction of such a Bill in the Council of States. The proviso is the exception that proves the rule: "no recommendation shall be required under this clause for the moving of an amendment making provision for the reduction or abolition of any tax." Imposition requires the executive's leave; abolition does not. Article 117(3) adds that a Bill which, if enacted and brought into operation, would involve expenditure from the Consolidated Fund shall not be passed by either House unless the President has recommended to that House the consideration of the Bill — so a Bill that merely happens to cost money is stopped, not at introduction, but at passing.
Article 110(1)(e) places within the definition of a Money Bill "the declaring of any expenditure to be expenditure charged on the Consolidated Fund of India or the increasing of the amount of any such expenditure", and Article 110(3) provides that if any question arises whether a Bill is a Money Bill, "the decision of the Speaker of the House of the People thereon shall be final". Article 109 confines the Council of States to recommendations which the House of the People may accept or reject, and deems the Bill passed if the Council does not return it within fourteen days. And the proviso to Article 111 permits the President to return a Bill for reconsideration only "if it is not a Money Bill": once a Money Bill has been passed, the options are assent and the withholding of assent, with no power of return.
Each of these provisions points the same way. Where money is concerned, the Constitution keeps the proposal with the executive, keeps the second chamber to a recommendation, places the classification in the hands of the Speaker, and reserves to the elected House a decision it can exercise in only one direction.
The recommendation is a gate, not a condition of validity
The requirement of a recommendation is nevertheless weaker than it looks, and the provision that weakens it sits in another Part. Article 255 is headed "Requirements as to recommendations and previous sanctions to be regarded as matters of procedure only", and provides that no Act of Parliament or of a State Legislature, and no provision in any such Act, "shall be invalid by reason only that some recommendation or previous sanction required by this Constitution was not given, if assent to that Act was given" — by the President, where the recommendation required was his, and by the Governor or the President where it was the Governor's.
So the recommendation required by Article 117 is a condition on what may be introduced or moved, enforced inside the House, and not a condition of the validity of what emerges. An Act passed without it is not void; assent cures the omission. The effect is to make the executive's control of financial initiative a matter of parliamentary procedure rather than of constitutional capacity — which is consistent, because the person whose recommendation was skipped is the person whose assent repairs it. Article 255 does not reach the other restrictions discussed here. A demand for a grant is not an Act, so Article 113(3) has nothing for Article 255 to cure; and Articles 110(3) and 114(2) do not require a recommendation at all. They declare a decision final, which is a different device.
Sub-clause (g) runs one way
Article 112(3)(g) allows Parliament by law to declare any other expenditure to be charged on the Consolidated Fund of India, and Article 202(3)(f) allows a State Legislature to do the same for its own Fund. This is the only route by which the boundary between the voted and the charged column can move, and it has a shape worth noticing.
A declaration under sub-clause (g) takes an item out of the annual vote. Nothing in these articles requires the declaration to be reviewed, renewed or reconsidered, and nothing provides for an item to be returned to the voted column except by another law. And because Article 110(1)(e) makes the declaring of charged expenditure a Money Bill matter, Article 117(1) requires the President's recommendation before such a Bill may be introduced at all. A House cannot, on its own motion, move an item out of the voted column; and once an item has left, it has left until a Ministry sees reason to propose its return. The one adjustment they permit to their own central distinction is available only on the initiative of the organ that benefits from it.
The contrast with Article 106 shows who bears the distinction. The salaries and allowances of members of either House of Parliament are to be "determined by Parliament by law", and are not charged by Article 112(3); they fall in the voted column with the rest of the civil expenditure. The salaries and allowances of the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker are charged. The Constitution insulates the officers who must hold the ring and leaves the members who make up the House on the ordinary side of the line.
What the design assumes
Read together, the articles do not assume that the House of the People will make a budget. They assume that someone else will make it and that the House will say whether it will have it.
There is a coherent theory behind that. A power to add expenditure is a power to spend without having to raise, and an assembly that could vote money into a demand would be an assembly able to confer benefits whose cost it did not have to defend. The Constitution keeps proposal and answerability in the same hands: the Ministry that asks for the money is the Ministry that must ask for the taxation, and by Article 75(3) is collectively responsible to the House that is being asked. On that theory the House's business is not to design the estimates but to decide whether the Ministry that designed them should have them, and the three verbs of Article 113(2) are enough for the purpose. Refusal and reduction are the whole of the vocabulary a body exercising a veto needs.
The difficulty is what that vocabulary becomes in practice. The power to refuse a demand is formally absolute and politically almost unusable, because a Ministry that loses its supply has lost the confidence of the House in the only sense that matters, and Article 75(3) supplies the consequence. The reduction of a demand carries a milder version of the same implication. The result is that the one instrument the Constitution gives the elected House is calibrated for a confrontation, while the ordinary work of scrutiny — asking whether a particular head is too large, or whether a sum would sit better under another, or whether an item belongs in the estimates at all — produces no outcome these articles recognise. Article 113(1) preserves the discussion of charged expenditure and gives it no effect; Articles 113(2) and 114(2) give the voted expenditure an effect in one direction and no power of rearrangement at all.
What they therefore distribute is not control over expenditure but responsibility for it. The executive proposes and is answerable; the House consents and may withhold; and the categories the Constitution treats as owed rather than chosen — debt, judicial salaries, the audit, the satisfaction of a decree — are placed where neither can reach them. That is a defensible design, and it is not the design the annual exercise is usually said to embody. The budget is not the occasion on which the representatives decide what the State will spend. It is the occasion on which they decide whether to let it.
Authored by Eshan Kumar Gupta, Advocate, Hon'ble Allahabad High Court, Lucknow Bench.