Define impartiality and discuss the role of impartiality in solving problems of weaker section.

Definition

• Impartiality is deciding by a public criterion — statute, evidence, and need — rather than by caste, party, kinship, gift, or fear.
• Nolan’s objectivity is the same demand: merit, fairness, and the best evidence, with conflicts declared.
• Kant’s test: would the noting still stand if the applicant’s surname were hidden? Rawls’s veil of ignorance is that test in political philosophy.
• The Conduct Rules and the oath of office bind this as duty, not as a private taste.
• Impartiality is not neutrality toward injustice; it is neutrality toward irrelevant identity while remaining partisan for the Constitution.

Role for the weaker section

• Weaker sections — Scheduled Castes and Tribes, women in many files, persons with disability, the landless, minorities under rumour — typically lack the phone that bends a clerk.
• Article 14, 15, 16, 17 and 46, and welfare statutes, already tilt the law toward them; impartiality is the habit of applying that tilt, not of “balancing” it away at the counter.
• A biased office makes the poor buy what is free: a caste certificate, a widow pension, a scholarship, a police FIR.
• Speaking orders, published cut-offs, social audit, and name-blind where the rule allows, convert impartiality from a sermon into a method.
• The Second ARC’s ethics and personnel reports linked impartiality to tenure, training, and protection for the honest “no”, because the weak suffer first when the honest officer is transferred.
• Case-ready: flood relief in eastern Uttar Pradesh by the damage list, not the booth; a POCSO or atrocity FIR registered on ingredients, not on the accused’s local clout; a ration shop inspected because the queue is of the poor, not because a notable complained.
• Thinkers in the chair: Ambedkar’s warning that political democracy fails without social democracy; S.R. Sankaran’s tribal land work as impartiality with a spine.