Indian History Quiz: British Administration: Civil Services, Police, Army and Judiciary

Cornwallis, Governor General from 1786 to 1793, is called the father of the civil services in India because he fixed adequate salaries for the Company's servants, forbade them from carrying on private trade or taking presents, and made promotion depend on seniority instead of patronage, which together turned a trading…

This Act took away the Company's right to nominate its civil servants and threw recruitment open to competition, after which the committee headed by Lord Macaulay in 1854 settled the syllabus and the first competitive examination was held in London in 1855.

Satyendranath Tagore, an elder brother of Rabindranath Tagore, succeeded in the London examination and joined the Indian Civil Service in 1864, nine years after the first competitive examination was held, and served in the Bombay Presidency.

Passed on the advice of the Police Commission of 1860, this Act gave every province an Inspector General, every range a Deputy Inspector General and every district a Superintendent of Police working under the district magistrate, with the village chowkidar at the base, and that structure is still recognisable in…

The commission appointed in 1902 under Sir Andrew Fraser reported in 1903 and asked for better pay, training schools, the recruitment of Indians as officers and a central agency to collect and share criminal intelligence; the Department of Criminal Intelligence was created in 1903 and grew into the central intelligence…

The Royal Commission on the Superior Civil Services in India, headed by Lord Lee of Fareham, recommended that direct recruitment to the Indian Civil Service be divided equally between Indians and Europeans and that a Public Service Commission be set up without delay, and such a commission began work in…

The Regulating Act made the Governor of Bengal the Governor General, gave him a council of four, and provided for a Supreme Court at Calcutta, which was established by a royal charter and began sitting in 1774 with Sir Elijah Impey as its first Chief Justice.

The Indian High Courts Act was passed in 1861 and the courts it authorised were actually established the next year, so the three presidency High Courts at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras date from 1862.

The Government of India Act of 1935 provided for a Federal Court to settle disputes between the centre and the provinces and to hear appeals on constitutional questions, and the court began sitting at Delhi in 1937 with Sir Maurice Gwyer as its first Chief Justice.

After the revolt the Peel Commission of 1859 advised a larger European element, the ratio of Europeans to Indians was raised to about one to two in Bengal and two to five in Madras and Bombay, and the artillery, the arm that decides a siege, was reserved for European troops…

The Charter Act of 1833 authorised the creation of a fourth presidency with its seat at Agra, and the Presidency of Agra was actually carved out of the Bengal Presidency in 1834, taking in almost the whole of what is now Uttar Pradesh; in 1836 the territory was placed under…