House creates ‘unproductive’ history

New Delhi, Dec. 13: The just concluded Winter Session of Parliament will probably go down in parliamentary history as one of its most “unproductive sessions”, causing the nation a loss of crores of rupees and at the same time seeing virtually no legislative business being transacted.

The Lok Sabha worked for just 5.3% of the scheduled hours and the Rajya Sabha for even less, merely 2.15% of the scheduled hours during the 23-day session, according to PRS Legislative Research.

A discussion paper prepared by the LS secretariat in 2008 had pegged the expenditure for running Parliament while in session at Rs 29,000 per minute.

While there is no specific, combined figure available on how much it has cost the nation for what’s being described as a “washed out” Winter Session, it’s clear that the losses are enormous. It costs the exchequer a whopping Rs 1.57 crore per day to run the Lok Sabha while it is in session as per figures computed by the LS secretariat said its recently retired secretary-general , Mr P.D.T. Achary.

It means that the LS, conducting normal business for just one of the 23 days it was in session, set the exchequer back by no less than Rs 34.54 crore this winter.

As for the Rajya Sabha, a senior RS secretariat official told this newspaper that no such overall figure has been computed for the Upper House.

However, both he and Mr Achary pointed out that there is really no end to calculating the cost of running Parliament when it’s in session. For then you would even need to taken into consideration the time spent by government officials in preparing replies to Parliament questions, spending time in Parliament, commuting to Parliament, etc.

Indeed, the expenditure of Rs 1.57 crore per day computed for the LS would be much higher if these factors too were accounted for, noted Mr Achary.

The existing calculation has only taken into account expenses like establishment costs, water, electricity and phone bills, MPs salaries and allowances, the salaries of the LS Secretariat staff, security, among other things.

The entire session with 23 sittings of each House saw Parliament failing to pass even one of the 31 Bills that were slated for approval. All that was passed, without any discussion, by the two Houses were the four Appropriation Bills whose approval was a constitutional necessity. The LS passed two pending Bills that enabled a change in the name of Orissa to Odisha and its language from Oriya to Odiya.

The LS Speaker, Ms Meira Kumar, and the RS Chairman, Mr Hamid Ansari, asked members to introspect on the functioning of both the Houses. “Personally it has been a sad experience for me and I hope Parliament functions smoothly in future,” Ms Kumar said.

“All sections of the House would perhaps introspect on the record of this session to seek the distinction between dissent, remonstration, agitation and disruption,” Mr Ansari said.

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