On April 4, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar made an announcement that helped the NDA garner a few brownie points in the public perception battle against the Congress and other opposition parties after the least productive Budget Session of Parliament in 18 years.
He claimed MPs of the BJP-led NDA would forgo their pay for the 23 days that were washed out.
Elaborating further later on, Kumar said 400 NDA MPs (from both Houses of Parliament) would forego nearly Rs 3.66 crore for the 23 days that were lost, due to what he termed as the “negative and anti-democratic” politics of the Congress party. Interestingly, some NDA allies as well as BJP MPs, including most notably Subramanian Swamy, were seemingly not too pleased with 'pay announcement' over the Budget Session washout.
However, the amount being 'given away' is arguably a fraction of what all the MPs earns. Our lawmakers get approximately Rs 1.6 lakh rupees as 'salary' (this figure will go up effective from April as the MPs get a 55 per cent hike). MPs also have generous allowances for air/rail travel, telephone use, office purposes and constituency development; so effectively, a lawmaker gets close to Rs 3 lakh per month.
Media sources that have covered the disruption in Parliament have repeatedly used one figure to highlight the loss to the exchequer: Rs 2.5 lakh per minute. That is the amount of money spent to run Parliament for a minute. The problem with the figure is that it was revealed in 2012 by then parliamentary affairs minister Pawan Kumar Bansal; the addition of the cost of inflation would have jacked up this figure considerably, from the time of the Congress-led government of Manmohan Singh to the Narendra Modi era.
The figure was revealed by Bansal as the BJP repeatedly disrupted Parliament over corruption allegations against the Congress and its allies.
With only five bills passed during the 2018 Budget Session, nearly 250 hours were lost in both houses. If we rely on the 2012 figure of Rs 2.5 lakh per minute to run Parliament, at least Rs 375 crore was lost due to the washed-out Budget Session, or approximately Rs 9 crore per day. This figure is 2.5 times the amount the NDA MPs will forego.
While the BJP has threatened to consider cutting pay for disruptions in Parliament, the larger question of ensuring Parliament's position as a forum for discussion and debate remains unanswered, more so after Speaker Sumitra Mahajan allowed passage of multiple bills without debate last month, as is the norm for the Budget Session.
'Washed-out' sessions have become the 'trend' since the UPA-2 government entered into its 'policy paralysis' phase since 2011. And this may well continue, with the country losing out the most as both Congress and BJP are unlikely to disagree on how much MPs are paid!