Legislators often cleared the proposals for government expenditure bypassing their primary responsibility of discuss and debate. Discuss its consequence and suggest measures to ensure their responsibility. (200 words)
Refer – Business Standard
Enrich the answer from other sources, if the question demands.
IAS Parliament 7 years
KEY POINTS
· The time spent on discussing the Budget 2018 was the lowest in the past 18 years.
· This indicates a lack of accountability in our system which forbids passing a bill without proper discussion.
Consequence
· It limits the rationality of the bill by excluding reasonable views of opposition.
· It will result in poor policies with contentious provisions affecting the welfare of the people.
· It reflects the poor parliamentary oversight on law making.
· It will result in wastage of taxpayers’ money when the main objective of discuss and debate gets failed.
Measures to ensure responsibility
· This had resulted in an argument that the parliamentarians must be held accountable for their actions.
· If parliamentarians, individually or collectively, allow the Finance Bill to be passed without any discussion, they must be held responsible.
· One of the proposed ways to ensure such responsibility is to enforce a rule that the Budget including the tax proposals cannot be deemed to have been passed unless these are subjected to a debate for a certain number of hours (calculated on an average).
· And to make it work, let there be a rule that if the Budget is not passed and funds cannot be drawn from the CFI, there will be a government shutdown as it happens in the United States.
· Parliamentarians escaping from their primary responsibility often being unnoticed and unpunished being the main reason for the perpetuation of such behaviour.
· The proposed way should inform the people about their irresponsibility and hopefully that would help them behave more responsibly.
