Winter session puts up cold show

At the onset of the Parliament’s Winter session, in 21 sittings spanning November 22 to December 21, it was expected that 31 pending Bills would be passed, a new Bill would be introduced, discussed and passed and 23 new ones would be introduced.

Halfway through the session, all of that seems to be a distant dream. First, the government and the Opposition squabbled over price rise and black money: Under which rule the two issues should be debated and in what sequence. Next, there was a logjam over foreign direct investment (FDI) in retail. Having transacted virtually no business in the 12 days it sat, Parliament will now meet on December 7.

Even if the FDI issue is resolved on December 7, as is widely expected, more dark clouds are looming on the horizon: On several Bills, there is no consensus between the government and the Opposition.

This includes the Lok Pal Bill, which should be cleared by the Standing Committee before the end of the session. Moreover, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ‘boycott’ of Home Minister P Chidambaram means more trouble, as the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2011, that he has to pilot is the first item on the order papers of the Rajya Sabha, pending for more than a week. According to legislative research body PRS, the record was no better in the monsoon session. The Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha were scheduled to work for 156 hours and 130 hours, respectively. However, the actual productive time came to be 104 hours and 81 hours, respectively. The worst performance was recorded in the 2010 Winter session, when both Houses were frequently disrupted over the demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe into the 2G spectrum issue.

BJP veteran and former Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Shanta Kumar told Business Standard: “What have we been reduced to ? If we (Parliament) doesn’t do its work, others will do it for us”.