The just-concluded Winter Session of Parliament will probably go down in parliamentary history as one of its most unproductive, causing the nation a loss of crores of rupees and seeing virtually no legislative business being transacted.

The Lok Sabha worked for just 5.3 per cent of its scheduled hours and the Rajya Sabha for even less, merely 2.15 per cent of the scheduled time in the 23-day session, according to PRS Legislative Research. A discussion paper prepared by the Lok Sabha secretariat in 2008 pegged the expenditure for running Parliament while in session at `29,000 per minute.
While there is no specific combined figure available on how much it has cost the nation for what is being described as the “washed out” Winter Session, it is clear that the losses are enormous. It costs the exchequer a whopping `1.57 crore per day to run the Lok Sabha while in session going by figures computed by the LS secretariat, its recently-retired secretary-general P.D.T. Achary said. This means that the Lok Sabha, conducting normal business for just one day in the 23-day session, set the exchequer back by no less than `34.54 crores this winter.
No such overall figure has been computed for the Rajya Sabha, a senior official of the secretariat of the Upper House told this newspaper. “No such back-of-the-envelope calculation has been done,” he said. But both he and Mr Achary pointed out that there is really no end to calculating the cost of running Parliament when it is in session. If, for example, you take into consideration the time spent by government officials in preparing replies to parliamentary questions and spending time in attending House proceedings, the cost could be immensely higher.
Indeed, the expenditure of `1.57 crore per day computed for the Lok Sabha would be much higher if these factors too were accounted for, Mr Achary noted. The existing calculation has only taken into account expenses like establishment costs, water, electricity and phone bills, members’ salaries and allowances, the salaries of the secretariat staff and security, among other heads.
The entire session, with 23 scheduled sittings of each House, saw Parliament failing to pass even a single one of the 31 bills due for consideration. All that got passed, without discussion, by the two Houses were four appropriation bills whose approval was a constitutional necessity to keep the government functioning. The Lok Sabha, incidentally, also passed two pending bills to enable a change in the name of Orissa state to Odisha and its language from Oriya to Odiya.
Mr Achary as well as the Rajya Sabha secretariat official dismissed as unrealistic daily expenditure calculations based on the combined budgetary allocations to the two Houses and the parliamentary affairs ministry. The budgetary allocation for Parliament for the current fiscal year is `347.65 crores for the Lok Sabha, `172.33 crores for the Rajya Sabha and `7.47 crores for the parliamentary affairs ministry.
As for the 32 bills slated for introduction, the treasury benches could introduce only nine, most of them amid unending din and uproar in the two Houses. Among these are the Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill 2010, the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Amendment Bill 2010, the National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010, the Protection of Women from Sexual Harassment at the Workplace Bill 2010 and the Enemy Property (Amendment and Validation ) Bill 2010 after the previous bill was withdrawn.