If the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has its way, Parliament will approve the Union Budget for 2011-12 by March 25, in less than a month of its presentation on February 28. This will be both unusual and unprecedented. Worse, it will deal a blow to the time-honoured tradition of subjecting the government’s annual Budget to elaborate scrutiny and discussion by members of Parliament, before the final assent by the president.
The schedule, followed for several decades, is that the Budget receives Parliament’s nod of approval by the first week of May. A lot happens during the nine weeks between the presentation of the Budget on the last working day of February and its passage in the first week of May. Various parliamentary committees examine Budget provisions and present their findings to the finance minister. Also, members of the two Houses get an opportunity to discuss the various provisions in the Finance Bill and even make useful suggestions on the expenditure programmes of a few central ministries. There is, of course, a short recess in between. But that only allows the parliamentary committees to complete their scrutiny of the Budget and table their reports before the two Houses.
The UPA seems set to give all these elaborate procedures short shrift this year. The recess, originally scheduled from March 16 to April 4, will stand cancelled. Parliament will approve the Budget by March 25, even though the parliamentary committees’ reports will not be available by then. So the Budget session of Parliament, normally the longest one of the year, may come to an end by March 25, making it the shortest Budget session ever!
The reason cited for curtailing the schedule of the Budget session is that five major states will have Assembly elections in April and May — Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. Our parliamentarians, the UPA managers feel, need more time for campaigning in these states before the elections. If Parliament’s Budget session ends by March 25 and the Budget is passed by then, the legislators can roam around freely, fully immersed in electoral concerns in their respective states, without worrying about either any constitutional crisis or their salaries. If the Budget exercise gets over by March 25, the government’s expenditure including the disbursement of salaries to our legislators as proposed for the next year will face no problems.
Make no mistake about the UPA managers’ political priorities and their cynical approach to the Union Budget. For them, it seems the parliamentary tradition of allowing a meaningful and constructive discussion on Budget provisions is an expendable aspect of political governance and far less important than the need for parliamentarians to engage in campaigning for Assembly elections in five states.
The UPA managers may argue that the quality of parliamentary debate on Budget provisions has been on a downhill journey for several years. The country, therefore, would not lose much if central legislators took a more active part in what, by common consensus, seem to be the most crucial Assembly elections almost at the mid-point of the UPA government’s second five-year tenure at the Centre. However, that argument ignores the responsibility of the ruling coalition to strive towards upholding parliamentary values.
The UPA managers would cite another argument in support of their move to curtail the Budget session this year. That argument is of precedence. Even the National Democratic Alliance government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee had sought recourse to sacrificing a proper debate on Budget provisions so that there was neither a constitutional crisis nor derailment of the government’s expenditure programmes. So why quarrel over what the UPA is planning this year if the main Opposition party in the current Lok Sabha has also been guilty of committing similar impropriety?
The problem is not just about the Budget. What happens to the several legislative Bills, including half a dozen financial sector reform Bills, that the government had planned to introduce or for which it planned to seek the assent of Parliament in the Budget session? If the session ends by March 25, what is the hope for any positive movement on this front? The government has already decided to postpone tabling the revised Companies Bill. No clear reason for this is available, but it would be reasonable to assume that the proposed curtailment of the Budget session must be a factor. There is also the amendment Bill to facilitate the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax.
The winter session of Parliament in 2010 was completely lost to the Opposition protests over the government’s reluctance to accede to the demand for a joint parliamentary committee to probe corruption charges relating to the allotment of spectrum to 2G telecom service providers. Now, the Budget session will lose more than half its normal time because our parliamentarians prefer to take part in Assembly elections in five states. Any doubts on whether we are suffering from governance deficit?
