Who cares about the Budget?

The longest session of India’s Parliament is traditionally the Budget session, which underlines the importance of the business of getting the legislature to scrutinise the Budget.

In reality, however, Lok Sabha in recent years has spent less and less time discussing the Budget — in fact, it spends much more time interrupting the session.

The result is that year after year an overwhelming majority of the government’s expenditure plans — the demands for grants of the various ministries and governments — have been passed by Lok Sabha with no discussion on them in the House.

The practice of applying the "guillotine" — under which all demands outstanding when the allotted time for discussion is over are put to vote without discussion — is now applied to most ministries.

Information available on the Lok Sabha website shows that in a typical year, the House manages to discuss the spending proposals of at best three or four of the 50-odd ministries. There have even been certain years — two years, to be precise — when the demands for grants of all ministries have been guillotined.

It is true that standing committees go into the demands for grants of each and every ministry and prepare reports on them during the mid-session recess, but that is obviously no substitute for the House itself debating the proposals.

The data in the accompanying graphic is collated from the "resume of work" put out on the Lok Sabha website for each session.

News Source : Samachar