UP Cabinet may discuss Assembly session dates tomorrow

The possible date for convening both Houses of the Uttar Pradesh legislature may be discussed at a meeting of the state Cabinet here tomorrow.
Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will chair the meeting. Other issues like transfer policy of state government employees etc will also be discussed in the meeting, official sources said today.
Once the Cabinet firms up the date of convening the two Houses of the state legislature, it is conveyed to the Governor, who then convenes the session.
This will be the first session of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly after the BJP stormed to power in the recent elections with three-fourth majority in the 403-member House.

As per parliamentary practice, the Governor addresses the year's first joint sitting of the state legislature and the first session of the newly formed government.
Uttar Pradesh has a bicameral legislature - the Assembly and the Council.

Talks of an impending session of both the Assembly and the Council gained momentum after the Chief Minister called on Governor Ram Naik here on April 22 and discussed about the first session of the state legislature.
However, there is no word yet from either Raj Bhawan or the government as to when the two Houses would meet.
A Raj Bhawan release said discussions were held about the first session of the state legislature, but there was no further clarification.

The previous Akhilesh Yadav government had tabled a vote-on-account of Rs 1.34 lakh crore to meet expenses of initial five months of the next fiscal (April-August 2017) besides tabling an interim budget of Rs 3.63 lakh crore and a supplementary grant of Rs 1,683 crore in December last year ahead of the Assembly elections.
A vote-on-account is a special provision by which the government obtains the vote of the Lower House for a sum sufficient to incur expenditure on various items for a part of the year. This enables the government to fund its expenses for a short period of time or until a full budget is passed.

The upcoming Assembly session could go on for a few weeks as Speaker Hriday Narayan Dixit voiced for longer sessions to enable meaningful debates and discussions on various burning issues before the state.
Asserting that the elected MLAs of the 17th Uttar Pradesh Assembly -- both ruling and Opposition -- are interested in smooth conduct of business, he exuded confidence in a recent interview to PTI that the House will run for more than 90 days a year.
The sessions have usually been very brief in the past, irrespective of which party was in power, lasting somewhere between less than a week to little over a week, barring the budget sessions.

According to the Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business of the UP Legislative Assembly, 1958, "every year, the Assembly shall ordinarily have three sessions -- the Budget session, the Monsoon session and the Winter session-- and sit for 90 days of which, as far as possible, a session for at least 10 working days shall be convened at the interval of two months.