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Key Issues in Parliamentary Functioning | UPSC GS II Notes

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Key Issues in Parliamentary Functioning

The effective functioning of Parliament is not merely an institutional concern — it is a democratic imperative. Parliament is the primary forum through which citizens’ representatives deliberate, legislate, hold the executive accountable, and give democratic legitimacy to governance. Yet India’s Parliament faces a deepening set of functional challenges that have progressively eroded the quality, depth, and seriousness of its functioning — not through any single dramatic breakdown but through an accumulation of procedural, political, and institutional failures that together raise fundamental questions about whether Parliament is fulfilling its constitutional role.

Issues

  • Declining Productivity and Sitting Days 
    • Drastically reduced sitting days — Parliament sits for far fewer days than in the early decades after independence — the 1950s and 60s saw significantly longer sessions and more sitting days annually than recent Parliaments
    • No constitutional minimum — the Constitution only requires Parliament to meet at least twice a year with no more than six months between sessions — providing no floor on minimum legislative working days
    • Session disruptions reducing effective working time further — even within scheduled sessions, actual productive sitting time is reduced by disruptions, adjournments, and walkouts — meaning the gap between scheduled and effective parliamentary working time has widened
      • The 17th Lok Sabha recorded only 47% productivity — with the 2023 monsoon session seeing just 18% functioning in Lok Sabha and 28% in Rajya Sabha due to disruptions
  • Disruptions, Adjournments, and Breakdown of Decorum
    • Disruption as political strategy — disrupting parliamentary proceedings has become a deliberate opposition tactic — used to embarrass the government, extract concessions, or signal strength — reducing Parliament to a site of political theatre rather than genuine deliberation
    • Adjournments on trivial grounds — the Speaker frequently adjourning proceedings at the first sign of disruption rather than maintaining order, inadvertently rewarding disruptive behaviour
    • Declining standards of parliamentary behaviour — instances of slogan-shouting, paper-tearing, rushing to the Well of the House, and physical altercations — a visible decline in the basic standards of decorum expected of elected representatives
    • Financial cost of disruptions — Parliament loses crores of taxpayer money in wasted expenditure for every hour it fails to function — disruptions carry a direct fiscal cost beyond the institutional damage
  • Hasty Legislation and Inadequate Scrutiny 
    • Bills passed without adequate debate — significant legislation increasingly passed with minimal debate time per bill — sometimes within a single session sitting, without clause-by-clause examination
      • Collapse of debate time — budget session debates reduced from 123 hours in 1990 to just 12 hours in 2023 — a tenfold decline in deliberative engagement with the government’s own financial proposals 
      • Major budgets were often rubber-stamped – about 80% of budget proposals between 2019 and 2023 were voted on without debate. 
        • In 2023, over 75% of budget requests were passed without discussion. 
      • Bills cleared without adequate scrutiny — 42% of bills in the 17th Lok Sabha were cleared in under 30 minutes 
        • Over one-third of bills in the 17th Lok Sabha were passed after less than one hour of discussion.
        • Several legislation were passed with less than one hour of discussion. These include, the Farm Laws Repeal Bill, 2021, Mineral Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2020, the Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2021, and the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008. 
    • Bypassing Standing Committee referral — a growing proportion of bills, including significant constitutional and policy legislation, passed without referral to Parliamentary Standing Committees — denying the process expert scrutiny, stakeholder consultation, and detailed examination
      • Between the 15th and 17th Lok Sabhas, there was a crash in the share of Bills referred to committees from 71% to 16%.
  • Omnibus bills and non-transparent bundling — complex, multi-subject legislation bundled into single bills — reducing parliamentary scrutiny of individual provisions
  • Guillotining of Demands for Grants — large expenditure heads passed without discussion when allotted time runs out — entire ministries’ annual budgets approved without a single question asked in the House
  • Anti-Defection Law’s Chilling Effect on Deliberation
    • MPs converted into party voting instruments — the Tenth Schedule’s disqualification threat has near-eliminated individual MP independence on most votes — genuine deliberation and cross-party reasoning replaced by mechanical bloc voting
    • Reduced floor debate significance — when outcomes are predetermined by party whips, floor debate becomes performative rather than deliberative — speeches delivered for the record rather than to persuade or be persuaded
    • Speaker’s partisan role in disqualification — the Speaker, typically a ruling party member, adjudicates disqualification petitions — raising structural concerns about impartiality in enforcing the anti-defection provisions
  • Ordinance Route and Delegated Legislation
    • Ordinance proliferation — frequent use of Article 123 to legislate during Parliament’s recess — bypassing deliberation on potentially controversial measures
      • Over 750 ordinances issued since 1950, bypassing parliamentary debate — from 2014 to 2023, 76 ordinances were passed, including the Farm Laws (2020) 
    • Re-promulgation of ordinances — ordinances re-issued repeatedly without parliamentary approval — declared a “fraud on the Constitution” by the Supreme Court in Krishna Kumar Singh (2017) but not fully eliminated
    • Explosion of delegated/subordinate legislation — vast regulatory frameworks built through executive rules and notifications under parent Acts — largely outside direct parliamentary scrutiny, with parliamentary oversight of subordinate legislation remaining nominal
  • Question Hour and Accountability Mechanism Weaknesses
    • Question Hour disruptions — one of Parliament’s most effective accountability tools increasingly disrupted — oral questions not reached, ministers not present, genuine supplementary questioning not pursued
    • Evasive and non-responsive answers — written answers frequently evasive, delayed, or technically compliant but substantively uninformative — the information Parliament receives often insufficient for genuine accountability
    • Zero Hour informality — while an important platform for raising urgent issues, zero hour operates without formal rules — susceptible to misuse for political grandstanding rather than genuine public interest concerns
      • Lok Sabha sat for just 60% of the scheduled question hour time from 2019-2024 and only 24% of listed questions were answered. 
  • Weak Research and Technical Support Infrastructure
    • MPs lack adequate research support — unlike legislators in many comparable democracies, Indian MPs have limited access to professional, nonpartisan research and analytical support — constraining their ability to engage substantively with complex legislation and policy
    • Inadequate secretariat capacity — Parliamentary Secretariat staff and resources remain insufficient relative to the volume and complexity of work Parliament is constitutionally expected to perform 
  • Rajya Sabha’s Evolving Role and Tensions 
    • Rajya Sabha as site of political obstruction — when the ruling coalition controls Lok Sabha but not Rajya Sabha, the upper house has increasingly been used as a site of political blocking rather than substantive revision and federal representation
    • Money Bill classification controversy — repeated use of the Money Bill route (Article 110) to bypass Rajya Sabha on legislation that critics argue does not qualify as a Money Bill — undermining the bicameral check the Constitution intended
      • Aadhaar Amendment (2016) passed as a Money Bill, sidestepping Rajya Sabha debate — undermining the bicameral check the Constitution intended 
    • Weakening of federal deliberation function — Rajya Sabha was designed as a federal chamber representing states — but its functioning has been progressively more shaped by national party considerations than by genuine state-level perspective articulation
  • Marginalisation of Opposition 
    • Mass suspension as a governance tool — in 2023, 146 Opposition MPs were suspended in a single session for demanding a debate on security breaches — raising serious concerns about the use of suspension powers to silence rather than discipline
    • Opposition voices systematically sidelined — limited time allocated for opposition to raise concerns — zero hour and short-duration discussions increasingly squeezed by government business
    • Disruption-suspension cycle — opposition disrupts because legitimate avenues for raising concerns are restricted; government suspends to proceed — a mutually reinforcing cycle that hollows out deliberation from both sides
    • Leader of Opposition post left vacant — the constitutionally and institutionally significant post of Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha left unfilled for extended periods — weakening the formal opposition voice within parliamentary proceedings
  • Uncodified Parliamentary Privileges 
    • Privileges remain undefined and uncodified — Article 105 (Parliament) leave parliamentary privileges largely uncodified — creating ambiguity about their precise scope and susceptibility to misuse
  • Vacant Key Constitutional and Institutional Posts 
    • Deputy Speaker post left vacant — the post of Deputy Speaker of Lok Sabha — constitutionally required to be elected — remained vacant throughout the 17th Lok Sabha, an unprecedented institutional lacuna
    • Leader of Opposition post unfilled — the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, a statutory post with significant institutional responsibilities (including role in key appointment committees), left vacant due to no single opposition party meeting the threshold — weakening institutional checks dependent on this role
  • Ethical and Accountability Deficit 
    • Attendance and participation gaps — significant variance in MP attendance and active participation — some members rarely present or contributing during sessions
      • Reviews of the attendance records indicate Members of Parliament are present but not engaged. Certain office holders, including the Prime Minister, are exempted, and intra-day absenteeism or reasons for absence are not indicated. 
    • Weak internal ethics enforcement — Parliamentary ethics committees and disciplinary mechanisms remain relatively weak, rarely imposing meaningful consequences for serious misconduct

Way Forward

  • Constitutional or statutory minimum sitting days — mandating a floor on annual parliamentary working days to restore adequate deliberative time
  • Mandatory Standing Committee referral — all significant bills referred before floor vote — restoring expert scrutiny to the legislative process
  • Reforming anti-defection law — restricting its application to confidence motions and money bills — restoring individual MP legislative independence
  • Strengthening question hour — enforcing ministerial attendance, oral answer obligations, and genuine supplementary questioning
  • Building in-house research capacity — a professionally staffed, nonpartisan Parliamentary Research Service embedded within the Secretariat
  • Marginalisation of opposition — codify clear, proportionate, and time-bound suspension procedures — preventing mass suspensions from being used as a tool to bypass opposition rather than enforce discipline 
  • Curbing ordinance misuse — stricter limits on re-promulgation and routine legislative bypass through executive ordinance
  • Reforming Money Bill classification — clear, judicially enforced criteria preventing misuse of Article 110 to bypass Rajya Sabha
  • Uncodified parliamentary privileges — enact a statutory Privileges Act codifying the scope, limits, and procedures for invoking parliamentary privilege — replacing arbitrary, undefined discretion with clear legal boundaries 
  • Vacant key posts — constitutional amendment or enforceable convention mandating election of Deputy Speaker within a fixed timeframe after House constitution, and statutory revision of LoP threshold to prevent indefinite vacancy

India’s Parliament — constitutionally designed as the supreme deliberative and accountability institution — is functioning at a fraction of its intended capacity, with declining sitting days, collapsing debate quality, weakened scrutiny, and systematic bypassing of legislative processes together signalling a deepening gap between democratic form and democratic substance. The data tells the story plainly: from 123 hours of budget debate to 12, from 70% committee referrals to 27%, from 120 sitting days to 70 — Parliament is doing less with each successive term. Restoring parliamentary effectiveness requires not just procedural reform but a renewed political commitment to the deliberative, accountability-imposing institution the Constitution intended Parliament to be — one that legislates carefully, scrutinises seriously, and represents genuinely.

Sample UPSC Mains Questions

Q1.Parliamentary disruptions undermine the deliberative character of Indian democracy. Examine.
(250 words, 15 marks)

Q2.Discuss the major issues affecting the effective functioning of Parliament in India. Suggest suitable reforms.
(250 words, 15 marks)

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