The Parliamentary System: Legislature and Executive

About this chapter

The Parliamentary System: Legislature and Executive is the sixth chapter of Class 8 Exploring Society: India and Beyond, Part 1, under the Governance and Democracy theme. It opens with Grade 8 students visiting the new Sansad Bhavan in Delhi and unfolds the architecture of India's bicameral Parliament — the President, the Lok Sabha (House of the People, max 550 members, directly elected on universal adult suffrage; 18th Lok Sabha constituted June 2024) and the Rajya Sabha (Council of States, indirectly elected by an electoral college, chaired by the Vice President). It explains the Speaker, four legislative functions (Constitutional, Lawmaking, Executive accountability, Financial accountability), the 8-step bill-to-act journey using the Right to Education Act 2009 (rooted in the 86th Amendment, 2002 / Article 21A) as a case study, the Union Executive (President, Vice President, Council of Ministers headed by the PM), Lal Bahadur Shastri's 1956 resignation as a moral-responsibility example, the Judiciary's role as the custodian of the Constitution, and the parallel structure at the State level (Vidhan Sabha, Vidhan Parishad, Governor, Chief Minister, Union List, State List, Concurrent List). CTET Paper 2 SST tests this chapter through factual recall (Lok Sabha number, bicameral meaning, Article 21A), cause-effect (why bicameral, why federalism), Money Bill rules, Question Hour, and pedagogy of teaching civic concepts to Grade 8. The four tests — Practice 15, Quiz 15, Hard 15, Mastery 30 — cover all six topic clusters at CTET depth.