When bills bypass due scrutiny

The Winter Session saw a hasty passage of legislations, offering minimal scope for debate and committee oversight.

India’s Winter Parliamentary session ran from December 1 to 19. A truncated window of just 19 days. The Lok Sabha recorded 110% productivity, measured in terms of actual passing of bills, while the Rajya Sabha exceeded 121%. Yet these represent a quantitative veil hiding a qualitative collapse.

A close look at the data reveals a qualitative decline of a legislature transformed now into rubber-stamping, where extra hours are utilised to move legislation faster rather than to sharpen it. Each Parliamentary session across the Houses appears less like a debating chamber and more like a corporate board meeting where the decisions were made long before the attendees arrived.

The high productivity metrics effectively measure the speed of approval rather than the depth of the debate.

The primary indicator of this parliamentary erosion remains the referral of bills to departmentally related standing committees. These bodies allow
the MPs to dissect legislation away from the political theatre of the floor, and historical data paints a picture of systemic decay.

The 15th Lok Sabha, between 2009 and 2014, referred 71% of all bills to committees to ensure laws underwent rigorous stress-testing. The government argues that speed is necessary to meet development targets and avoid the legislative paralysis of the past. However, data suggests this efficiency comes at the cost of due diligence.

The 16th Lok Sabha saw referrals drop to 25% and the 17th Lok Sabha drove this figure down to 16%. The Winter Session 2025 solidified this trend with a referral rate of 20%, where only two out of 10 bills reached a committee. When a bill skips a committee, it means no civil society groups are heard, and no state governments are consulted. It essentially means
the government is flying blind on
policy impact.

This trajectory confirms that the institutional capacity for scrutiny has been structurally compressed because the bureaucracy now drafts laws that bypass the legislative check entirely. The most significant legislative casualty of this process involved the effective dismantling of MGNREGA. The government introduced a new framework in its place, titled the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Aajeevika Mission (Gramin) or the VB-G RAM G Bill.

While policy shifts such as the 60:40 funding split between the Union and states are contentious, the method of passage was even more alarming. A law reshaping the livelihood security framework for tens of millions of rural households was introduced on December 16 and passed by December 18, leaving less than 48 hours between introduction and passage.

The demand to refer the Bill to the Standing Committee on Rural Development was rejected, and the government passed this structural overhaul via a voice vote without a recorded division. The government applied the same high-speed method to the energy sector through the SHANTI Bill, which ended the State monopoly on nuclear energy established by the 1962 Atomic Energy Act. The legislation invites private players and 100% Foreign Direct Investment to meet a 100-GW target. Yet the text leaves liability caps for private operators vague.

A shift of this magnitude ordinarily demands extensive scrutiny of complex nuclear liability insurance norms. The Parliament passed the Bill within a week of its introduction without it reaching the Standing Committee on Science and Technology.

A granular analysis of the 110% productivity figure reveals a strategic displacement of legislative business, where nearly 40% of parliamentary time was devoted to general discussions with no legislative consequence.

A special discussion marking the 150th anniversary of Vande Mataram consumed close to 25 hours across both Houses. Issues such as air pollution and the employment crisis never got any parliamentary attention.

The government claimed it lacked time to have a longer debate on electoral reforms as the Opposition sought a specific inquiry into large-scale voter deletions.

Assent in absence

The Sabka Bima Sabki Raksha (amendment of insurance laws) Bill followed the script by raising the FDI limit in insurance from 74% to 100%, which effectively removed the requirement for Indian ownership. Such a change would ordinarily warrant scrutiny by the Standing Committee on Finance. The government bypassed this step by arguing that earlier committees had examined the sector.

The Winter Session operated in the long shadow of the 2023 suspension of 146 MPs, which recalibrated the boundaries of parliamentary protest. Presiding officers now strictly police the Well of the House, leaving the Opposition with walkouts as its primary tool of dissent. The executive converts absence into assent through voice votes, erasing both opposition and accountability. The appearance of consensus is manufactured precisely where division should be visible.

The metrics of the Winter Session invite us to celebrate speed and volume, but Parliament was never designed to optimise for flow. The Founders built it to introduce friction. Committees and delays exist as safeguards that force the State to pause and reflect.

The inefficiency of the UPA era, with its frequent committee referrals, may have been the sound of the democratic immune system at work. The hyper-efficiency of the 18th Lok Sabha feels clean and administratively impressive yet democratically hollow. When democratic scrutiny vanishes, the Parliament ceases to be a check on executive power and becomes a conveyor belt for those in power to pass what they want.

(Deepanshu is a professor and Dean, O P Jindal Global University; Ankur is a research assistant with the Centre for New Economics Studies at the university)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.