Amid the excitement over India’s World Cup victory in cricket, Anna Hazare’s movement against corruption and Assembly elections in five states, we have almost forgotten that Parliament passed the Union Budget for 2011-12 even before the new financial year had begun and its Budget session ran for just about a month.
The significance of the two developments is immense. Rarely has the Union Budget received Parliamentary approval before April. The normal schedule for the passage of the Budget involves Parliament scrutinising the various tax and expenditure proposals through discussions on the floor of the two Houses until the first or second week of May. This year, however, was an exception and Parliament approved the Budget on March 24, less than a month after it was presented on February 28.
Another unusual development took place around the passage of the Budget this year. Along with the discussion on the Budget on the floor of the two Houses, the various standing committees of Parliament also scrutinise the fiscal proposals and present their report before the members. This is a practice that has been followed since 1993. This year, however, the standing committees were unable to scrutinise the Budget proposals because there was no Parliamentary recess when such scrutiny could take place.
PRS Legislative Research, a New Delhi-based independent research organisation, has highlighted another interesting fact about the manner in which Parliament passed this year’s Budget. According to it, the demands for grants or budgetary allocations for only four ministries came up for discussion during the Budget session. The rest of the demands were “guillotined” or put to vote without any discussion.
Now, the demands for grants thus “guillotined” constituted as much as 81 per cent of the total Budget demands. What Parliament discussed and voted pertained only to expenditure by the ministries of rural development, road transport and highways, external affairs and mines. Last year, Parliament showed no such hurry and passed the 2010 Budget only by May. Yet, 84 per cent of the demands were guillotined in 2010, compared to 79 per cent of the demands guillotined in 2009. This is a bit of a puzzle. It defies common sense and logic that in spite of a shorter time taken to pass the Budget this year, Parliament could discuss and approve more demands than it could in 2010.
Perhaps, because the session was short, members of Parliament may have realised that they should devote more time to discussing the demands for grant for different central ministries. Indeed, the PRS Legislative Research data show that as much as 38 per cent of the productive time in the two Houses of Parliament was spent discussing the Budget. In previous years’ Budget sessions, the time taken to discuss the Budget constituted a smaller portion of their total productive time.
Apart from discussing the Budget, what did our Parliamentarians do during those four weeks? Only 12 per cent of the time was spent on legislation. Not surprisingly, only the Budget-related Bills were passed during these four weeks. Apart from the Budget-related Bills, the government had promised to introduce 34 Bills in Parliament in the last session. However, it managed to introduce only nine Bills because of the shorter duration of the session.
Nine per cent of the productive time of Parliament’s Budget session was used to discuss the President’s address and only seven per cent was devoted to Question Hour, where members can get their questions answered by ministers. Almost a third of Parliament’s time was spent discussing non-legislative issues like the formation of the joint parliamentary committee to probe the 2G scam.
If Parliament approved the Budget in less than a month and its Budget session ran for only a month, nobody other than the Parliamentarians themselves should take the blame. The government cannot escape its responsibility either. Remember that the reason for cutting short the Budget session and doing away with the need for scrutiny by the various standing committees of Parliament was to enable members of the two Houses to campaign in the five states in which elections were due. Remember also that no political party opposed the government’s proposal to curtail the Budget approval process.
Two issues will now arise. One, should Parliament change its schedule to suit the polling dates in different states? After all, the first priority of members of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha is to debate national legislative issues and not worry about electoral battles in different states. Two, would a similar curtailment of Parliament’s sessions be the norm when the next round of state elections are held? The government needs to tackle both issues before such moves can undermine our democratic institutions further.
