Goa's legislators spent more time patting themselves on the back, rather than working for their constituents in the brief yet important five-day budget session of the Legislative Assembly that concluded earlier this month.
Consider this. On the fifth and last day of the session which had, among other things, two calling attention motions, five private members' resolutions, and four bills listed as part of the day's business, the House chose to spend nearly three hours speaking on winning the Best Small State Award bestowed upon it by National News Weekly.
As many as 34 members of the 40 member house chose to speak on that resolution.
To debate the four bills that were listed for the day, three of which were passed, only five members of the house spoke spending a total of barely 36 minutes.
This was just one day of the recently concluded session, one of the most significant because of the budget tabled in the House March 5.
Assembly statistics also reveal that the legislative assembly spent a whopping 6:05 hours congratulating legislators and others for various achievements while spending only around 50 minutes over five days discussing and passing legislation.
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Congratulatory motions were moved in honour of sportsperson achievements, cultural awards and several other causes that the House thought fit to mention.
The House also spent over 50 minutes congratulating Porvorim MLA Rohan Khaunte for receiving the Adarsh Yuva Vidhayak Puraskar, 2013, for his "contribution to Indian Democracy". Members from across the party line including those from the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party, Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party, Goa Vikas Party and Independents contributed to the minutes spent congratulating their colleague.
Indeed, the data shows that the Goa Legislative Assembly has spent the single largest chunk of its time on congratulatory motions spending more than six of the total 20:17 hours that it sat during the budget session of the Goa assembly. That's close to one-third of the total time the 40 legislators have been in session.
The sixth session of the sixth Goa legislative assembly also saw Chief Minister and Finance Minister Manohar Parrikar spending 1:40 hours reading out his budget speech.
An hour every morning is dedicated to Question Hour and the House spent exactly four hours on the four days that the Question Hour was scheduled.
The budget session was spread over five days from March 3. On the first day of the session the only significant business of the day was the Governor's address to the House.
Speaker of Goa assembly Rajendra Arlekar has already gone on record about the consistently dropping standards of debates and discussions among members while the assembly is in session.
(Mayabhushan Nagvenkar can be contacted at mayabhushan.n@ians.in)