Committee Hearing in Relation to Departmental Matters
Strengthening Parliamentary Committees in India: Addressing Key Challenges
Parliamentary committees in India play a crucial role in ensuring accountability of the Executive to the Parliament. However, these committees face several challenges that impact their effectiveness.
- Resource Constraints and Technical Support Committees often struggle with limited secretariat support, lacking dedicated research staff or specialist advisors. This hinders their ability to conduct detailed scrutiny. To address this issue, providing adequate research and expert advisory support to committees is essential to enhance their analytical capabilities.
- Lack of Independence and Political Influence Some committees face pressure from government or party leadership, affecting their impartiality and objectivity. To ensure more balanced representation across parties and autonomy for committees in setting agendas and conducting investigations, procedural safeguards need to be enhanced.
- Limited Powers and Follow-up Committees do not have the authority to enforce their recommendations, often resulting in their reports being ignored in parliamentary debate and executive action. Institutionalizing mechanisms to track implementation of committee recommendations and mandating parliamentary discussion of committee reports can increase their impact.
- Participation and Attendance Issues MPs show low attendance and engagement in committee meetings, limiting their effectiveness. Encouraging greater participation through incentivization and awareness of committees’ importance can help improve their effectiveness.
- Disruptions and Time Constraints in Parliament Frequent disruptions reduce time for legislative scrutiny, affecting both Question Hour and committee visibility. Improving parliamentary decorum and scheduling more frequent and longer sessions focused on committee work and detailed scrutiny can help mitigate this issue.
- Limited Accessibility and Transparency Committee reports are not sufficiently accessible to MPs outside the committee and the public, reducing accountability. Using technology to publish committee reports online in accessible, user-friendly formats and conducting periodic public briefings or stakeholder consultations can enhance transparency.
- Political Procedural Issues Affecting Committees Practices like classifying bills as Money Bills to bypass Rajya Sabha scrutiny weaken committee roles in legislative review. Defining clearer guidelines to prevent misuse of procedural classifications and strengthening the committee system within both Houses, especially in the Rajya Sabha, can help uphold checks and balances.
Improving Parliamentary committee effectiveness in India requires a multipronged approach: boosting resources and technical support, ensuring political neutrality, increasing engagement and participation of MPs, strengthening procedural powers and follow-up mechanisms, enhancing transparency using technology, and curbing disruptions that limit parliamentary functionality.
In the context of strengthening parliamentary committees in India, it's crucial to acknowledge the role of policy-and-legislation in setting guidelines to prevent misuse of procedural classifications and strengthen the committee system, thus ensuring checks and balances (politics). To further enhance committee effectiveness, it's important to focus on increasing public accessibility and transparency of committee reports, which can be achieved through technology (general-news).
