The 1970 Budget is not remembered for the procedural slip-up but for the change in its tone. Until then, Budget speeches were a dry recitation of facts as FMs had yet to start using poetry and couplets.
Saturday, February 28, 1970, was a special Budget day in Parliament. Prime Minister Indira Gan...
In the history of Indian democracy, the constitutional crisis in Uttar Pradesh in 1964 is one of the earliest examples of a confrontation between the judiciary and the legislature that led to the “derailment” of the “governance apple cart”.
Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar ...
Laws related to religious conversions repeatedly made headlines in 2022. During the year, the state legislatures in Karnataka and Haryana made laws prohibiting forced religious conversions. A few months before elections in Himachal Pradesh, the state legislature amended the freedom of...
This year, Parliament will move from its 90-plus-year-old building to a new one. As part of that transition, it should reimagine its rules to make the institution more deliberative and one that scrutinises laws more thoroughly.
2022 was a turbulent year for our national legislature. There were co...
Ever imagined working for a politician and getting paid? That is what the Legislative Assistants to Members of Parliament (LAMP) Fellowship is about. Run by PRS Legislative Research, this enables youth to engage in the domain of law-making and public...
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Kirodi Lal Meena, Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament from Rajasthan, has had a long legislative career. He won his first state election in 1985 at the age of 34. Four years later, the voters of Sawai Madhopur elected him to the ninth Lok Sabha, an election where he defeated his Congress opponent by a ...
The winter session of Parliament begins today. It is the year's last session and usually begins in the third week of November. This year, it is starting after the conclusion of the Gujarat elections. Our Parliament does not have a fixed calendar for its sittings. Therefore, successive ...
Parliament usually meets for its winter session in the third week of November. It is the last session of the parliamentary calendar, and generally, in this session, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha meet anywhere between 18 and 21 working days. But our national legislature is mostly in recess during the yea...
A part of the Constitution of India goes against its very spirit. It is the Tenth Schedule, that was added by the 52nd Amendment. Passed by Parliament in 1985 to prevent political defections, it is commonly referred to as the anti-defection law. It was meant to prevent legislators elected on on...
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose's statue at India Gate. Along with it, he inaugurated the rejuvenated Central Avenue that the government has renamed Kartavya Path. The PM's office stated, "It symbolises a shift from er...
On Thursday, we discussed Midnight’s Borders by Suchitra Vijayan. It was apt, as the day was International Democracy Day. And this book that we had all read, pushed our book club readers to examine the anomalies in our democracy.
“We behave like an empire- specially in our b...
The sign that a political crisis in a state is reaching a critical stage is when parties start moving their legislators to resorts. Earlier this week, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and the Indian National Congress flew their MLAs to Raipur. The two parties constitute the governing alliance in...
In May 1952, Members of Parliament (MPs) of the first Lok Sabha assembled to elect its Speaker.
The Congress candidate was GV Mavalankar, who had been in the Speaker’s chair since 1946. Opposing him was Shankar Shantaram More, a newcomer to Parliament. The election was a formality as Congre...
The colonial mindset in the country has been the subject of recent debate. Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred to it in his Independence Day address. He urged the citizens to shed the colonial mindset and called for a national effort to make the country a developed nation by 2047, when w...
Post lunch on a Friday is a quiet time during a parliamentary session. The government has no business on its agenda, and many Members of Parliament (MPs) use this opportunity to head back to their constituencies to be with their people. Other MPs use this time to discuss matters of national importan...
The monsoon session of Parliament has finished two days ahead of schedule. Our national legislature passed four laws in a lacklustre session dominated more by political drama than deliberation. Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha witnessed acrimonious scenes, which led to the sus...
Over this week, the two Houses of Parliament have suspended 27 MPs between them, the latest being two AAP MPs and an independent MP from Rajya Sabha on Thursday. Lok Sabha has suspended four Congress MPs, and Rajya Sabha 23 MPs from the Trinamool Congress, DMK, TRS, CPI...
The differences between the government and the Opposition are hardening in the ongoing monsoon session. This week, Lok Sabha suspended four Members of Parliament (MPs) of the Congress for the rest of the session. The Rajya Sabha has suspended 19 members from different political p...
Hemant Tukaram Godse is the Lok Sabha Member of Parliament (MP) representing Nashik, Maharashtra. When the voters of Nashik first sent him to Parliament in 2014, he found himself in a peculiar position. His surname was considered unparliamentary. Parliamentary rules specify that presiding ...
In July of 1987, Mithilesh Kumar Sinha was the most protected man in the country. The authorities housed the frail 67-year-old man in a Lutyens bungalow. Police officers surrounded him, and a doctor checked on his health regularly. He headed an organisation called the Goodman’s party, which wa...
Hemant Tukaram Godse is the Lok Sabha Member of Parliament (MP) representing Nashik, Maharashtra. When the voters of Nashik first sent him to Parliament in 2014, he found himself in a peculiar position. His surname was considered unparliamentary. Parliamentary rules specify that presiding officers c...
The foundation of free and fair elections is the secrecy of the ballot. The Rajya Sabha elections are unique in that respect, where voting is not secret. The MLAs elect their state Rajya Sabha MPs, and as the process stands now, have to show the votes to their party’s representative....
The complexities of the anti-defection law have surfaced again in the recent developments in Maharashtra. There are several questions that need to be decided. Can the Speaker (or in his absence, the deputy Speaker) decide on a disqualification petition while a no-confidence motion is pending against...
A CAG report reveals that the State’s spending across sectors has been below the budgeted amount in the last few years
On May 26, the government of Uttar Pradesh presented its Budget for financial year 2022-23. Projecting a total expenditure of ₹5,82,956 crore (excluding debt repayment), th...
The unfolding political crisis in Maharashtra has thrown the spotlight on the anti-defection law, and the roles of the Deputy Speaker and the Governor.
On Wednesday (June 22), the ruling Shiv Sena called a meeting of all its MLAs in Mumbai. Some of its legislators have aligned...
The Indirect Tax paradigm in india changed with the implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in July 2017. The underlying compass of taxation changed, too as GST is collected at the place of supply of goods/services as compared to the earlier regime where tax was collected at the source. G...
Our Constitution promises freedom of speech and expression to everyone except MPs and MLAs. They lost their right to speak their mind in 1985. It is this right to speak freely that former Congress leader Kabil Sibal wants to secure for all elected representatives. While...
In his final remarks before the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, BR Ambedkar said, “The Constitution can provide only the organs of State such as the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. The factors on which the working of those organs of the State depends are the people and...
There is never a dull moment in our politics. A week ago in Maharashtra, the only blip on the radar was the Shiv Sena's candidate Sanjay Pawar losing and the Bharatiya Janta Party's Dhananjay Mahadik winning the Rajya Sabha elections. After the victory, media reports quoted&nb...
Earlier this week, the West Bengal legislative assembly passed a bill to make the chief minister the chancellor of 31 state public universities. The governor of West Bengal had earlier held this position.
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Who will be BJP’s and Opposition’s presidential candidates? There are many theories and names. Let’s note one fact, though: All of our Presidents other than President APJ Abdul Kalam have been political personalities.
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The President and Parliament are joined together by a line in our Constitution. Article 79 states, “There shall be a Parliament for the Union which shall consist of the President and two Houses to be known respectively as the Council of States and the House of the People.” Beyond th...
The Ministry of Education has been allocated Rs 1.04 lakh crore in this year’s budget. This allocation constitutes 3% of the central government’s estimated expenditure for 2022-23. The allocation to the National Education Mission is the fifth-largest among all major schemes at Rs 39,553 ...
You are about to start hearing the name of justice Ranjit Singh Sarkaria. He retired as a judge of the Supreme Court (SC) in 1981 after serving for seven years. His profile on the SC’s website records that early on in his career, he was part of a two-member committee to translate the Constitut...
The number of days that the Punjab Assembly is in session each year has been a persistent downward slope, the lowest being during the term of the 15th Assembly in 2021 (11 days) Highlights Days in session hit record-low in 2021, yearly average at a mere 14-days All these Bills were passed on the sam...
The Assembly met for only 21 days a year, on average. The Deputy Speaker of the Assembly was elected after more than four years of constitution of the Assembly. The Assembly met only five times for 10 or more days. Each of these were budget sessions.
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Highlights
The Assembly passed 92 Bills in its term. Of these, 91 were introduced and passed in the same session.
Only four Bills were referred to Committees for further examination.
The tenure of the 7th Assembly marks the lowest number of sitting days in a year since 1989. The 7th Goa ...
The Supreme Court of India will soon hear a petition to remove the stay on the Haryana State Employment of Local Candidates Act, or the Haryana Act, that reserves 75% of jobs in the private sector in the State for local residents. The Act applies to jobs that pay up to ₹30,000 per month, and employe...
Halfway through its five-year term, the current Lok Sabha has passed more than 100 laws. To put that number in context, its predecessor, the 16th Lok Sabha, had during its entire term passed 133 laws, which itself was 15% more than the number passed by the 15th Lok Sabha. While this scorching legisl...
The framers of the Constitution and members of Parliament had highlighted the concerns in our founding document, many of which were rejected during its framing, that took almost three years, and it came into effect on January 26, 1950.
Space entrepreneur Elon Musk would have loved Const...
The winter session of Parliament ended bitterly with political parties accusing each other of stifling debate. The national legislature passed legal proposals on surrogacy, assisted reproductive technology and dam safety during the session. And towards its end, the government pushed through a conten...
There is one word that describes Parliament in 2021: Disrupted. Last year, the national legislature was missing during the coronavirus pandemic, and only met for 33 days. This year, people hoped it would make up for lost time. The expectation was that the institution would devote itself to addressin...
On 16 December, 1971, Members of Parliament (MPs) were anxiously waiting for news from Dacca (now Dhaka). The liberation of Bangladesh with the support of Indian armed forces was imminent. MPs took different approaches, waiting for more information to come in.
Some were in the Lok Sabha chamber d...
The DNA Technology (Use and Application) Bill and the Personal Data Protection Bill, likely to come up in the ongoing winter session of Parliament, provide a framework and safeguards for using our data by businesses and the government.
Laws are blunt instruments. Changes brought by them reverbera...
The Winter Session of Parliament began on a stormy note on Monday. Both Houses saw disruptions as Lok Sabha passed the Bill repealing the three farm laws without any discussion, and Rajya Sabha passed it after a brief intervention by Leader of Opposition Mallikarjun Kharge.
After that, ...
There is a simple test to judge a parliamentary session. Former Lok Sabha Speaker GMC Balayogi came up with it. At 46, he was the youngest Speaker, and according to him, “All’s well if it doesn’t end in Well.” He was referring to the well of the House. It is the area before t...
Legislative business in Parliament has suffered in the last two years. Last year, the government did not convene the winter session due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This year the budget session was cut short due to assembly elections. Then in the monsoon session, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha passed multip...
In December of 1958, a Member of Parliament (MP) questioned the Finance Minister about a valuable gift received by Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru. Earlier that year, Indians in Hong Kong had gifted the Prime Minister his weight in gold (64 kg) on his 70th birthday. Nehru must have been aware of th...
In January 1930, the Madras Legislative Council was discussing a law on prostitution. A fundamental point of contention was how the law should define a prostitute. The definition before the council was: “Prostitute means a woman who offers her body for indiscriminate sexual intercourse for hir...
