E-Paper
Questions on social welfare top Parliament proceedings
A study of the Question Hour of the 17th Lok Sabha and its corresponding period in the Rajya Sabha shows that MPs posed more queries on issues such as health, education and agriculture.
Parliament may have seen protests or uproar over border tensions, agriculture laws, defence deals or foreign affairs, but its lawmakers have typically shown greater concern for issues of livelihood and social welfare in their questions, according to data analysed by HT.
A study of the Question Hour of the 17th Lok Sabha and its corresponding period in the Rajya Sabha shows that parliamentarians posed more queries on issues such as health, education and agriculture than foreign policy or defense .
In the past eight sessions of the Lok Sabha, a total of 13,496 questions were asked on issues related to the health ministry, followed by 10,905 on agriculture and 9138 on education. But parliamentarians asked just 2787 questions to the external affairs minister and 3687 to the defence minister.
The numbers reflect the total number of questions posed by members starting from the monsoon session of 2019, the first after the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, and up to this year’s budget session. Officials however, pointed out that only a limited number of questions could be taken up for oral or written replies. “Every day, we can take only 20 questions for oral replies and 230 for written replies. Also, a member can ask only 5 questions daily. Excess questions are considered lapsed but a member can ask them on some other day,” said RS Kambo, former additional secretary of the Lok Sabha.
Six-term Lok Sabha MP Bhartruhari Mahtab maintained that being elected from the House of the People, lawmakers’ choice of questions also reflect the issues in their constituencies. “The Question Hour is essentially a period that is used by lawmakers to raise concerns of the people. Without undermining the debates on the country’s security or on raging issues such as the farm laws, it is one of the most important parts of daily proceedings to talk of welfare and livelihood, the day-to-day problems of the people.”
The use of Question Hour to flag problems in constituencies and to get an instant reply from the government perhaps explains the high number of questions asked on railways, the key connectivity link in rural India and smaller towns. In the 17th Lok Sabha, a total of 9103 questions were asked to the railway ministe.
In the Rajya Sabha, too, the social sector has found higher priority but as the composition of the Rajya Sabha is different in nature from the Lower House, the larger questions on India’s security do not seem to lose their prominence. While 4547 questionswere asked on health issues, another 4365 questions were submitted for the home ministry and 4440 for the finance ministry.
The priority of MPs also varies depending on the prevailing issues in the country. After the ordinance was promulgated on three farms laws in June 2020, the monsoon session of Parliament saw 2024 questions on agriculture — the highest in the eight sessions of 17th Lok Sabha. Similarly, when Afghanistan went into turmoil with the Taliban increasing its presence in 2021, the monsoon session received 498 questions for the external affairs ministry. .
