In the winter session, members of Parliament (MPs) debated and passed legislation on diverse subjects, including allowing 100% foreign direct investment in insurance, increasing the rural employment guarantee from 100 to 125 days, opening the atomic energy sector to private players, and imposing a cess on paan masala to finance health and national security. The discussion on some of these bills lasted for hours and went on late into the night. The debate on the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) or VB – G RAM G Bill, 2025, went on till 1 am in Lok Sabha and was passed by Rajya Sabha at 2 am the next day. But Parliament did not send the four bills mentioned here for detailed scrutiny by its committees.

Parliament needs sharper tools to examine laws. House debate alone for scrutiny is like taking a knife to a drone fight. It is here that parliamentary committees step in. (HT Archive)

Modern legislation is both technical in the subjects it deals with and complex in its policy implications for India’s 1.4 billion people. Their scrutiny by Parliament requires more expertise and nuanced deliberation than a simple political debate on the floor of the House. The absence of such scrutiny hasn’t gone unnoticed. A high-powered commission set up during Prime Minister (PM) Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s time observed that “our legislative enactments betray clear marks of hasty drafting and absence of Parliament scrutiny from the point of view of both the implementers and the affected persons and groups”. More recently, in 2021, then Chief Justice of India NV Ramana observed, “We see legislations with a lot of gaps, a lot of ambiguities in making laws. There is no clarity in [the] laws. We don’t know what [is] the purpose of the laws, which is creating [a] lot of litigation, inconvenience, and loss to the government as well as inconvenience to the public.”

Parliament needs sharper tools to examine laws. House debate alone for scrutiny is like taking a knife to a drone fight. It is here that parliamentary committees step in. These committees, comprising MPs from both Houses, go into the minute details of each legal proposal brought by the government. They invite experts and stakeholders to testify, hear the government’s viewpoints, and then make recommendations to improve a bill. But in recent years, Parliament has preferred House debate over scrutiny by its committees. In the current Lok Sabha, our national legislature has referred only 11 out of 42 bills to committees.

Parliamentary committees have a long history in our country. The first took root in the 1850s, and by 1919, the report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, paraphrasing Woodrow Wilson, noted, “Much of the most solid and useful work in the sphere of legislation is done in the seclusion of the committee room and not in the publicity of the council chamber”.

Shortly after independence, the government felt parliamentary standing committees were better suited to a pre-independence period, when the government was not responsible to the legislature. A government report noted, “... such standing committees were out of date and did not fit with the constitutional change that had taken place and the democratic pattern under which the formulation of policies and its execution became the responsibility of a Council of Ministers responsible to Parliament”. PM Jawaharlal Nehru felt that, in the changed constitutional circumstances, the standing committees had “no meaning”. As a result, after consultation with the presiding officers of the two Houses, they were abolished. Parliament began using a select committee system, creating a temporary committee to examine each legislation. Ministers piloting the law presided over these committees.

Our Parliament joined other mature legislatures when it adopted a permanent subject committee approach in 1993. Under this system, a permanent committee of MPs examines the work of a government ministry. To prevent conflict of interest, ministers are not part of these committees. Then Vice President K R Narayanan outlined that the purpose of the committees “is not to weaken or criticise the administration but to strengthen it by investing in with more meaningful parliamentary support”.

To perform their roles, a dedicated secretariat staffed by parliamentary officials who have expertise in the subject works with the committees. Outside experts also support the committee’s work. For example, earlier this year, the RBI governor briefed the Finance Committee on the evolving role of the central bank in India’s dynamic economy.

There now exist two paths for scrutinising legislation in Parliament. The temporary committee system that was in place after independence, and the permanent subject committees, which began work in 1993. Their parallel existence presents two challenges. First, sending a bill to a temporary rather than a subject committee signals that the specialisation of these committees may not be valued. As a result, it may disincentivise MPs from participating in the specialised subject committees.

Second, on a contentious bill, political parties may decide not to join a temporary committee. It recently happened in the case of the joint committee examining the bill that proposes removing ministers who have been in jail for more than 30 days.

Such a step undermines the credibility of the committee system, whose entire basis is that it is a mini Parliament, its membership representative of the political spectrum in the legislature.

Both these pathways also have a fundamental flaw: Who decides which Bills committees examine?

Currently, the minister piloting a bill decides whether to send it to a select/joint committee. They can base their decision on suggestions from other MPs. If the minister decides against sending a bill to a temporary committee, the presiding officers of Parliament decide whether to refer it to a committee for detailed scrutiny. Ministers will often implore the presiding officers not to refer a bill, because they want it passed urgently. A poorly made law has a significant opportunity cost for the country. Therefore, Parliament should require its subject committees to scrutinise every government legislative proposal. These permanent subject committees should be at the heart of our law-making process.

The Constitution has entrusted Parliament with the responsibility of making laws for the country. The institution should ensure that its legislative scrutiny is rigorous, process-driven, and not diluted by discretion, urgency, or politics.

Chakshu Roy is the head of legislative and civic engagement, PRS Legislative Research. The views expressed are personal