Houses passed only 23% of planned bills this year

Areport released on Tuesday said that just 10% of the listed questions were replied to orally in the two Houses, which is set to create a record of the most disruptive Parliament since Independence. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Dec 19, 2013, 11:55:18 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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In an adverse remark on how the Parliament functions, a report released on Tuesday said that just 10% of the listed questions were replied to orally in the two Houses, which is set to create a record of the most disruptive Parliament since Independence.

The seventh citizens’ report on governance and development 2013 released on Tuesday said only 23% of the 94 planned bills were passed, of which about 18% got approval in less than five minutes in a din.

The report also said the lower house lost more time because of disruptions. The 15th Lok Sabha lost 577 hours as compared to 442 hours by the Rajya Sabha.

And amid these frequent disruptions, the question hour took the biggest hit.

The report, which is evaluating the performance of four apex institutions of the country, also pointed out that on average the lower house worked for less than four hours a day during its 227 sittings, which means two-thirds of time was lost in commotion.

Amid this, the report said MPs got their salaries and perks increase manifold making it 68 times more than the per capita income of an Indian. In fact, MPs get more salary than their counterparts in the developed countries such as Japan, Singapore and Italy.

As the Parliament remained stalled, the report said a farmer committed suicide every 30 minutes with 2.56 lakh farmers taking their lives between 1995 and 2010. This is indeed a worry for the government.

The report also said that the government’s social sector spending has fallen from 14.9% of the GDP in 2012-13 to 14.6% this fiscal.

In judiciary, the number of pending cases rose from 2.81 crore in 2004 to 3.17 crore in 2011.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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