Monsoon Session: Much Ado About Nothing

The Monsoon Session of Parliament concluded yesterday. This session was all about numbers, and percentages: 33 per cent reservation for women, 300 per cent salary hike for MPs across the board, and so on. Considering the hue and cry they made when this bill was under discussion, one does expect better performance from them in the Parliament. A look at these numbers proves the fact that our MPs are hardly bothered about discussing issues that affect us.

As the session comes to an end, we share some more numbers that might be equally relevant, as a yardstick to measure the performance of the “servants of the people”:

1.  55 per cent of the question hour in Lok Sabha and 44 per cent in the Rajya Sabha were lost due to disruptions. What this really means is that the majority of time when our MPs are supposed to raise issues of local and national concern was spent behaving like spoilt children, throwing tantrums, and walking out of the house. Relevant to note in context is the cost of this misbehavior: Rs 20,000 per minute, according to this story.

2.  The Question Hour was a major disaster. Only 10 per cent of starred questions were answered. This is a direct corollary of point one — since the MPs were so busy misbehaving, 90 out of every hundred questions asked during the time allotted to question-and-answer exercises went unanswered. Keep this in mind next time you are confronted by an issue of concern to you, and wonder what your MP is doing about it. Either he is not asking the question, or if he is, then no one is answering it.

3.  64 MPs did not even bother to show up for a single hour of a single day of the monsoon session — with an attendance record like that, you wouldn’t be allowed to write your school exam. Also, your company would have handed over the pink slip by now.

4.  The Indian National Congress, the party leading the government, saw 34 per cent of its MPs participating in the debates relating to the laws they were trying to pass — in other words, 66 per cent of Congress MPs did not bother to attend. The main opposition party, the BJP, did even worse — only 24 percent, that is, one in four BJP MPs, bothered to debate the laws the government sought to pass.

5.  Considering the fuss about reservations for women in Parliament, the performance of women members tells a story. While women currently constitute 11 per cent of the total strength of the Lok Sabha, only 8 per cent of women MPs bothered to attend debates. Incidentally, in a government that is essentially a gerontocracy [average age of Cabinet -= 64] our hope is supposed to lie in the “younger” MPs — defined as age 40 or less. In this category, which comprises 13 per cent of the Lok Sabha, only 8 per cent participated in the various debates, thus matching the performance of the largely non-performing women. On the good side, young MPs did ask a lot of questions — 13 per cent of the total questions asked came from them. Of course, considering point 2 above, all of their activity was of little use anyway, since not too many questions were answered during this session.

6.  What is really startling is 47% of the bills that were introduced in the parliament were passed in just 2 hours. And the most debated N-bill saw participation from only 20 MPs.

Apart from this, the Nuclear Liability Bill and the Direct Code Tax bill that were introduced are yet to be cleared. The Direct Tax Code will replace the Income Tax Act, and will ring in many changes in personal and corporate taxation. It will come into effect starting April 1, 2012.