UPSC Prelims 2021— Question 2

The 44th Constitutional Amendment removed the Right to Property from the list of Fundamental Rights. Article 300A now protects it as a constitutional legal right: no person can be deprived of property except by authority of law. Article 300A is not confined to citizens, so the right is available to any person. It is therefore different from the former Fundamental Right under Articles 19(1)(f) and 31. The final answer-key position for Set C identifies option B as the correct option. Option A — Legal right available to citizens only — is not correct because it does not satisfy the specific condition tested in the question; it represents an alternative that is contradicted, incomplete, or less precise than the accepted answer. Option B — Legal right available to any person — is correct because it is the alternative that matches the constitutional, historical, geographical, scientific or economic principle established above. Option C — Fundamental Right available to citizens only — is not correct because it does not satisfy the specific condition tested in the question; it represents an alternative that is contradicted, incomplete, or less precise than the accepted answer. Option D — Neither Fundamental Right nor legal right — is not correct because it does not satisfy the specific condition tested in the question; it represents an alternative that is contradicted, incomplete, or less precise than the accepted answer. For PYQ interpretation, the distinction between the correct alternative and merely related facts is important. UPSC often places plausible distractors beside the precise statement that matches the underlying rule, chronology, definition or empirical relationship. The answer should therefore be read against the exact wording of the question rather than against a broadly related fact.