← ⚖️ Civics · usually met in Std 6-12
Three organs — legislature, executive, judiciary — across three levels: union, state, and local. Each is meant to check the others.
Parliament has two houses: the Lok Sabha, directly elected, and the Rajya Sabha, elected by state legislatures. The government of the day is drawn from the legislature and is answerable to the Lok Sabha, which is what parliamentary means. The President is head of state and acts on the advice of the Council of Ministers in nearly all matters. States mirror this structure with Assemblies and Chief Ministers, and the 73rd and 74th amendments created elected panchayats and municipal bodies below them.
The judiciary is separate and can strike down a law that violates the Constitution. Powers are divided between the union and the states by three lists — union, state and concurrent — and disputes about who may legislate on what are a regular part of Indian public life.
Want to see it moving? Search YouTube for “How India is governed” ↗ — we send you to the search rather than to one video, because a link to one video eventually rots.
This entry was written for Star Student in our own words — it is a summary, not a source. Here is where the people who actually hold these facts keep them. Go and check.
Your own textbook ↗Balbharati publishes the textbooks free to read online. Your chapter is the thing to check first — an encyclopedia is a summary, and the syllabus is the syllabus. Election Commission of India ↗How elections are actually run, by the body that runs them.For the Constitution itself, the authoritative text is the one published by the Legislative Department of the Government of India — we have not linked it here because we could not reach it to check the address.
Last gone through: 1 October 2026 · How these entries are written
Ask GuruAcharya Samayeshwar
