With new Parliament building to welcome MPs soon, here's what will change

In the new Parliament House, with a soft launch this winter session (the full functionality will happen in January in the budget session), papers are supposed to disappear among other things

The next time a minister is stumped by a tricky question from a member in the Question Hour, don’t expect to see a helpful assistant pop up next to his elbow, with a slip. “Communication between ministers and secretaries of the departments for exchange of notes during the house proceedings”, shall be taken over by NeVA, the acronym for National e-Vidhan Application, said a Parliament official. 

In the new Parliament House, with a soft launch this winter session (the full functionality will happen in January in the budget session), papers are supposed to disappear. Each member will instead sit with a terminal at her desk, that will even order her food from the house canteens. For ministers, secretaries can scribble notes on linked pads even from their offices, to respond to queries from members. 

Even committee meetings, so long held in camera, are likely to become public now. There are other changes to make the members potentially lose their anonymity in the back benches. The system will have an e-attendance suite for the members on real time. 

Each of these changes have huge ramifications. 

The Digital Sansad programme, the signature part of the NeVA project, is the largest ever revamp of the legislatures across the country. Some like Tamil Nadu and Odisha have moved considerably in this direction, but the largest demonstration of the move to a digital workplace for the representatives of the people, shall happen now. 

The scale of this change shall be dwarfed by the massively rebuilt Parliament building. The triangle shape will swallow up one entire road—Raisina road, when it throws open its doors. 

Despite the scale of that demonstration, the larger change is expected to be inside the legislatures and the way the myriads of bodies in Parliament conduct themselves. No major Parliament anywhere in the world has revamped itself at this scale at one go, said Chakshu Roy, who heads the legislative and the Civic engagement initiatives at PRS India, the think tank about Parliament procedures.

Risks — real time 

One of the biggest of these changes is the control of what is spoken. Parliament and state legislatures are essentially temples of the spoken word, which is why it matters a lot who gets to control the records for posterity of what was said. 

In a welcome leap of faith, the new Parliament shall offer simultaneous interpretation services for every word that is spoken in this building, in the 22 languages recognised by the Indian Constitution. 

There is a huge challenge here. Presiding officers of both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha shall have to decide instantaneously, what is expunged and what is not when members speak. Parliament is a place for the representatives of the people to let off their feelings — good, bad and ugly. Very often, their words and even sentences are vitriolic, understandably. 

The live telecast of the sessions has made it impossible to keep those utterances off the airwaves. The pressure shall be on the written records too and in many languages. 

Under the Digital Sansad project there shall be a continual evolving of intelligent Speech-to-Text system “which in near real time can create an accurate transcript of the proceedings of the house using an audio feed of the proceedings”, said a government official. The machine learning system will cater to the diversity that the Members of Parliament bring in terms of geographies and accents. 

This technology has the potential to make Parliament’s written records difficult to sanitise. At present, members and ministers speak in the respective houses in Hindi or English. Parliament reporters take notes of what they speak, going off to prepare transcripts, subject to corrections. While MPs get to see what they spoke, the ministers’ comments are sent to respective ministries for their approval before those are published. It takes time. The system has been in operation for almost a century without change, predating Indian independence. 

At the stroke of a button, all those practices shall become history. But authorities who have devised the system do not think there shall be any chaos. 

"Technology cannot override institutional authority. Translations in real time or close to it, will always be classified as subject to corrections”, said RS Shukla, IAS, former secretary, ministry of Parliamentary affairs. 

Shukla has spearheaded the development of the e-Sansad and the National e-Vidhan Application, till his retirement in 2020. He is fully aware of the scope of the changes. “So there shouldn't be a problem to decide which version is the record copy”, he adds. 

He explained that the applications have been developed to function as member centric, that is remain device neutral and be user-friendly. But the records of what is spoken will mimic the controls which have run till now. The only difference is that each member will have access to the diverse range of House Business “elegantly by putting entire information needed by them in their hand held devices/ tablets”. 

Other officials also concurred, despite the scale of change. For instance, because of advanced metadata tagging and AI enabled search function, each word spoken can and will be automatically indexed and tagged in the audio-video files. A government note says “for better searchability, and to provide a detailed automated transcript of the audio-video content in multiple regional languages of India. The video tagging would enable a user to search (with timestamp) a video based on any specific word or phrase that appears in the video”.

For both MPs and presiding officers, this shall thrust a greater role of vigilance on what remains on record.  

Sansad TV is meanwhile developing the capacity to offer caption like feed on the screen of the MPs for all speeches in the house or in the committees. The feed shall be “somewhat rough” since several of the languages have limitations as far as technical words go. But it will be a start, he said. 

24-hour vigilance

In secretariats across government ministries, the officers have become used to deploy the full range of information technology in their tasks. The annual budget is now fully paperless and so is most inter-ministerial communications. But communications with Parliament is a humungous paper filled affair. 

An estimate by the ministry of Parliamentary affairs notes that after Odisha government went paperless in its budget, it cut down use of “about 15 million pages of papers and saved about 2,000 large trees annually”. Once implemented across all legislatures it will save Rs 340 crores annually. 

But more significantly, despite all the potential information at their command, MPs often remain clueless about policies and projects. “The stack of paper sent to their homes, often late into the night is absurdly huge”, said one of the officers from Lok Sabha secretariat. No one can read through those papers and be prepared to chase the government for compliance on them, said Roy. “For instance, as a minister is speaking a member can glance through the relevant records on her tablet on the table and rebut arguments”, said an officer. 

They can now be suitably informed and do it any time round the clock. The papers can remain in the archives, instead. 

For the citizens too, the change is a big deal. At the end of the day the words spoken in Parliament will be available to each Indian citizen cutting across language barriers. The natural language processing engine for language translation of Parliament website is expected to make house debates “open and accessible to every citizen, overcoming the barriers of language”, the government paper notes. 

The technology is developed using visual Studio 2017 and Microsoft Sql Server. This software is developed in asp.net core 2.2 in mvc architecture, signal-R core, html, css, JavaScript, jQuery, json & bootstrap 

NeVA Digital House has the following major modules

• E-Laying of all the Papers using Digital e-Book. 

• Communication between Speaker (Chairman) and the Secretary using electronic PAD.

• Communication between Minister and Administrative Secretaries for exchange of notes during the House Proceedings 

• E-Voting on any of the List of Business Item

• E-attendance of the Members

• Business Controller Module

• Digital Display System of LOB Items

• Speaker‘s Talk Time Management