Ensure 50% attendance, meet for at least 150 minutes: RS Chairman Venkaiah Naidu to Parliamentary panel heads

Setting new targets for Parliamentary Standing Committees, Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu has asked heads of eight panels under the Upper House to take measures to ensure at least 50% attendance in meetings which should deliberate issues for at least two-and-half hours every time it meets.

Naidu wrote to the Chairpersons of eight Standing Committees under Rajya Sabha on February 12 with an analysis of the functioning of the committees since September 2017, after he became the Rajya Sabha Chairman.

Naidu emphasised the need for further improvement in attendance and duration "given the efforts and costs involved in holding meetings", sources said.

The analysis, shared with the panel chairpersons, showed that attendance has improved by 15% and meeting durations by around 16% since the reconstitution of committees in September 2019 over that of the previous two years.

Though attendance has improved, the analysis showed, 54 meetings since September 2017 did not have a requisite quorum and of this, 40% or 20 of them happened since September 2019. One of the reasons could be the MPs inability to reach Delhi during the Covid-19 pandemic.

While eight Standing Committees -- Home, Transport, Education, Industry, Commerce, Personnel, Science and Technology and Health -- are under Rajya Sabha, 16 other panels are under the Lok Sabha. Each committee has 31 MPs -- 10 from Rajya Sabha and 21 from Lok Sabha and attendance of 11 constitutes the quorum.

Since September 2017, the eight committees under Rajya Sabha have held a total of 355 meetings -- 134 in 2017-18, 49 in 2018-19 and 172 since September 2019.

The average attendance of these committees since September 2019 was 49.34% in 172 meetings. While no committee recorded an average attendance of 50% during 2017-19, three committees clocked more than 50% attendance in the meetings held since September 2019.

The Committee on Education reported the highest average attendance of 65.30% followed by the Committee on Health (52.46%) and the Committee on Transport (50.42%).

The average duration of meetings of these committees since September 2019 improved to 2:07 hours per meeting marking an increase of over 16% over the average duration of the meetings held during 2017-19.

If one takes all the 355 meetings since September 2017, the average attendance comes to 46.01% and an average duration of 1:55 hours.

When it comes to quorum, the Commerce panel had the highest number of meetings without a quorum since September 2019 -- six out of 25 meetings -- followed by Science and Technology -- four of the 17 meetings held during this period.

The Commerce panel also has the highest number of meetings without quorum -- 13 -- since September 2017 followed by Home, Education and Science and Technology (10 each).

The highest number of meetings since September 2017 was held by the Commerce panel during which 92:57 hours were spent on deliberations.

The committees on education and home affairs had 50 meetings each. The education panel met for 116.21 hours since September 2017 while the Home panel met for 106:30 hours.

Attendance percentage showed that the Education panel had the highest at 54.19% since September 2017. If one takes the attendance since September 2019, it rose to 65.29% for the education panel.