Parliament moves to greener pastures

Parliament moves to greener pastures

Sample this: a single question and answer put to the Home Ministry during Question Hour during the monsoon session of Parliament ran into 113 pages. With 500 question and answer sets distributed to the media on an average, that added upto a staggering 56,500 pages, that too for a single question. For the record, the maximum number of questions are routinely addressed to the Home ministry (821 that session), followed by 665 questions put to the Finance ministry. Not just the financial costs of this exercise but the reams and reams of paper that go into this gargantuan task, is mind boggling.

So in its bid to help save paper, the Parliament is in the process of doing away with this practice of distributing printed hard copies of questions of the various ministries in the Question Hour, making the disseminiation of information on the working of the government as paperless as possible. In fact, it’s the Press Information Bureau PIB which is the brains behind this environment friendly move.

PIB officials inform that it was initially a Parliamentary committee looking into the minimizing the use of paper to make offices paperless, which began urging them to make efforts to cut down the use of paper. Several MPs and bureaucrats were also in favour of such a move. Since the mandate of the PIB extends to the media alone, the bureau proposed to discontinue the practice of printed question papers. Says a PIB official: “The press and media, both print and electronic, are routinely using the online platform to access, generate and upload news. Therefore it would not be difficult for them to access the questions once they are uploaded online.” He added, “It is all a part of  the e-governance and paper-less office initiative in keeping with best international practice.”  As of now Members of Parliament, 545 of the Lok Sabha and 250 of the Rajya Sabha continue to get the hard copies of the Question Hour questions.

While the Rajya Sabha stopped distributing printed questions from 1 March 2013,  the Lok Sabha will discontinue the circulation of printed questions only from the next Parliament session. The Rajya Sabha now uploads the questions on the website by noon every day, but the Lok Sabha officials said that it would take them time to get it going technologically.

Nonetheless, the PIB has made an effort to minimize the paper usage even in this – while earlier 500 question and answer sets used to be printed for the media, beginning with this Budget session only 200 sets are being printed for distribution from the Parliament.

Says Neelam Kapur Principal Director General of PIB, “We had been contemplating on doing this for quite some time and had written to the Secretaries of all the ministries to make available their questions and answers to us in the soft format. Once this was made possible, we decided to stop distribution of question paper in the physical format.”  She added, “However this cannot be done at the cost of information not being made available to journalists. So while the Rajya Sabha questions are all now online the Lok sabha is yet to do so, but will do so by next session.”

Alongside this the PIB has for some time now been reducing the number of hard copies of its press releases, printing only a handful for its record and library purposes- the rest is all available online. The PIB ensured that this time around the Budget too had more copies of it available for distribution in soft format in CDs than in the hard printed format.

While this paper-less initiative has earned kudos for the PIB, oficials are waiting for the time when Members of Parliament will not cite Parliamentary privileges to hold on to their right of obtaining hard copies of parliamentary questions. After all, it is only the odd MP today that is not net savvy or does not have an online presence.