Maharashtra Just Gave Its CM the Power a Court Said He Didn't Have

A Constitutional Provision for Procedure, Now Doing the Work of Substance Article

166(3) says the Governor "shall make rules for the more convenient transaction of the business of the Government of the State and for the allocation among Ministers." In plain English, this is a housekeeping power - it decides who signs what and how files move, not who has the final say over another minister's decision.

Maharashtra's new Rules of Business, 2026 use exactly this housekeeping provision to create Rule 13(5): a Chief Minister's power to override any minister's decision "in public interest." That is not convenient transaction of business.

That is a substantive reallocation of decision-making authority - done through subordinate rule-making, not legislation and arriving three years after a court said this specific power did not exist.

The

Rule as Written, the Rule as Practiced Under the 1975 Rules, ministers were the primary disposing authority for their departments' business and the Bombay High Court's Nagpur Bench confirmed exactly that reading in the Chandrapur cooperative bank case: then-CM Eknath Shinde's 2022 order staying Minister Atul Save's approved bank recruitment was quashed because the CM "had no power under the 1975 rules... to review or modify a minister's decision." The rule as written, in other words, gave ministers real, court-enforceable authority within their portfolios. The rule as practiced now, under Rule 13(5), erases that boundary - not by amending any statute Parliament or the Assembly debated, but by the Governor issuing new procedural rules under Article 166(3), on the advice of the very executive that benefits from the change.

What Article

166(3) Was Never Meant to Settle This matters constitutionally because Article 166(3) was designed as a flexible, low-friction mechanism precisely because it deals with administrative convenience, not the balance of power between the Chief Minister and Council of Ministers - a balance ordinarily understood through the doctrine of collective responsibility and the CM's role as "first among equals," not first among unequals.

Using this low-friction mechanism to reverse a specific, adjudicated limit on CM power - rather than through legislative amendment with its higher political cost and public scrutiny - is what makes this rule change different from routine administrative tidying and exactly why it is being read in Mumbai as a Fadnavis-Shinde power move rather than a housekeeping update.

For an aspirant, the exam-relevant insight is that Article 166(3)'s flexibility is a double-edged constitutional tool: the very feature that lets state governments update their administration efficiently is the same feature that lets an executive quietly reverse a judicially settled limit on its own power, without ever facing the legislative process that limit would normally require to be undone.