Making legislative scrutiny rigorous and process-driven

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.

- Chakshu Roy

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 RAMG 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.

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.”