Govt says Winter session of Parliament will continue as per schedule

"There is no move to adjourn the session sine die. It will continue as per schedule," Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal said. Earlier, highly placed Parliament sources had said that Parliament could be adjourned sine die as early as tomorrow with the deadlock continuing and huge amount of money being wasted as proper functioning cannot take place.

As per an estimate, Rs 63 crore have been lost due to non-functioning of Parliament for eight days. The government is not ready to accept the demand for a JPC into 2G spectrum allocation as it fears that the Prime Minister could be summoned, the sources claimed.

Efforts have been made to reconcile the differences between the government and Opposition over the JPC issue with Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee holding two rounds of meetings with leaders of all parties which failed. Sources said while all the Opposition parties are united on the JPC demand, some allies of the UPA and sections in Congress are also indicating their willingness to have such a probe given the extent of the scam as pointed out in the CAG report.

The government has been insisting that Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC), headed by BJP leader M M Joshi, was appropriate to go into the CAG report.
Later on, it proposed that the multi-disciplinary investigative agencies could be attached to the PAC. However, the Opposition has maintained that it would accept nothing less than JPC. It argues that PAC does not have powers to summon senior ministers, which JPC could. Due to the stand-off, Parliament failed to function for all the ninth consecutive day today.