A K Bhattacharya: Parliamentary paralysis

84% of government expenses were passed without scrutiny

The 2010 Budget session of Parliament ended last Friday. The Budget session is usually the longest and this one started on February 22 and ended on May 7, with a short four-week break in between. An assessment of what the two Houses of Parliament achieved during the Budget session is, therefore, a good indicator of how effective the government was in pushing its legislative agenda for the year.

Such an assessment can now be undertaken, thanks largely to the comprehensive work done by PRS Legislative Research, a wing of the Centre for Policy Research, which has collated and analysed data on the manner in which Parliament functioned during the just-concluded Budget session. The findings are a telling commentary on the disturbing nature and direction of the debate and discussion that took place in Parliament. A few trends deserve scrutiny.

First, the broad picture. The government had planned 35 sittings each for the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha during the Budget session. The number of sittings actually achieved was 32 each. This may not seem a big problem, but this overlooks the fact that in these sittings, the government managed to get only 15 Bills passed, compared to its target of 28 Bills, set at the start of the session.

This makes it appear the government managed to get Parliament’s approval for more than half of the Bills that it had hoped the two Houses would clear. Take a closer look and you will find that of the 15 Bills passed, as many as nine pertained to the Union Budget and the Railway Budget including the finance Bill and the appropriation Bills for them. In other words, Parliament passed only six other Bills, leaving out a large number of pending Bills in both Houses.

At the start of the Budget session, there were 49 pending government Bills in Parliament. The government had prepared a heavy legislative agenda and managed to introduce 37 new Bills (including nine relating to the Union Budget and the Railway Budget). However, with 32 sittings in each of the Houses, Parliament worked for only 66-74 per cent of the scheduled hours. The result: the government managed to increase the number of its pending Bills from 49 in February to 70 in May. No government can be proud of such an achievement!

The list of 70 pending government Bills is an indication of the yawning gap between the government’s legislative agenda and the actual performance with regard to implementing that agenda over the last few years. Mind you, the government has been introducing many of the pending Bills in the Rajya Sabha so that their life continued even after the dissolution of the Lok Sabha. While this has helped in preserving the Bills, the absence of real legislative work in the two Houses has resulted in an increase in the number of pending Bills.

The Bills that are now gathering dust in Parliament’s cupboards include those pertaining to the companies law, foreign trade, industrial disputes, insurance industry, telecom regulatory authority, mines and minerals industry, drugs and cosmetics industry, motor vehicles legislation, labour laws, coal mines, trade marks, the stock markets regulation, foreign educational institutions, chartered accountants, copyright laws and petroleum products transportation. The list is long and shows the range of legislative changes that have not happened because of the failure of Parliament to work more efficiently.

How did the Budget session of Parliament treat the Union Budget? Parliament approved all the Budget-related Bills, but discussed the expenditure demands for only three ministries out of a grand total of 54 ministries whose demands for grants were presented along with the Budget. These three ministries accounted for only 16 per cent of the total government expenditure that Parliament had to vote on and approve. Thus, as much as 84 per cent of the government expenditure to be incurred by 51 central ministries was passed by Parliament without any discussion as “guillotine” (the process of putting to vote without discussion) was enforced. This was worse than what happened in the 2009 Budget session, when six ministries’ demands for grants, accounting for 21 per cent of the total government expenditure, were discussed before the “guillotine” was enforced.

Indeed, never in the last six years of the Manmohan Singh government has Parliament managed to discuss the demand for grants of more than six ministries in any of the Budget sessions. If the number of pending legislative Bills continues to rise and even the Parliamentary scrutiny of expenditure through discussion in the two Houses gets restricted to only a handful of ministries, it is reasonable to wonder if something is seriously wrong with the way the central government and Parliament are functioning.