The parliamentary affairs ministry is looking forward to a fortnight-long schedule towards the end of the upcoming Budget session of Parliament for the first innings of proposed legislations of the second UPA government.
Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal will meet the secretaries of different ministries on June 25 to know the wish lists of these ministries for the Budget session. “We will hold this meeting to know various ministries’ priority agenda before we make a plan for the introduction of the government business in the next Lok Sabha session,” Bansal told Business Standard on Monday.
“This will help us set our agenda for the next session. But we may not be able to accommodate all the legislative issues in the upcoming session. It will also depend on the preparedness of the ministries and the availability of time in the two Houses,” Bansal added.
The discussion and the approval of the Railway and General Budget are likely to occupy the first three weeks of July. So, the government will try to utilise the last two weeks till August 6 to work on its other legislative business. The Budget session is scheduled to start on July 2. The Railway and the General Budget will be tabled in Parliament on July 3 and 6, respectively.
The agriculture, food and civil supplies ministry is aggressively working on the proposed Food Security Bill to provide subsidised wheat or rice to the families below the poverty line (BPL), while the rural development ministry may try to pass the long-pending Rehabilitation and Resettlement policy along with amendments to the Land Acquisition Act.
The fate of some key reforms Bills like the Insurance Act amendments and PFRDA still hangs in the balance and Bansal is awaiting the finance ministry’s nod on these issues.
“It will depend of the finance ministry if it wants to push these contentious bills now or will wait for another session of Parliament. We might get an idea of what they want in the meeting with the secretaries,” said an official in the parliamentary affairs ministry.
While the government wants to use the Budget session to introduce new Bills and try to pass pending legislations, the Opposition, too, is gearing up to raise its pet issues. The Left parties will seek time for a detailed discussion on the Maoist violence in Lalgarh.
The Left, which alleges that Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress is supporting the Maoists in their violence against its comrades in Bengal, will try to use the platform of Parliament to corner the Union railway minister and her party.
