Kill Bill

The just concluded 15th Lok Sabha will go down as the most unproductive of all assemblies of elected representatives of Parliament. The lower House, during its five-year tenure, passed just 177 Bills, compared with 248 and 297 in the preceding 14th and 13th Lok Sabhas. Frequent disruption of proceedings — including one caused by the use of pepper spray by a member ostensibly in self-defence — led to the House working for only 61 per cent of its scheduled time. The blame for this primarily lies with the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) which returned to power for a second time in 2009 with a clearer mandate to govern on its own terms. That it still could not set the agenda by passing important legislations demonstrates the squandering of an opportunity.

A major casualty of this mismanagement has been economy-related Bills. The bulk of them — barring the new Companies Act or the one making the pension regulator a statutory authority — could not be passed. They include those paving the way for implementation of a nationwide Goods and Services Tax, raising the foreign direct investment cap in insurance from 26 to 49 per cent, replacing a five-decade-old Income Tax Act with a more modern Direct Taxes Code, setting up an independent regulator for the coal sector, providing statutory status to the Unique Identification Authority of India and the commodity markets regulator, and bringing microfinance institutions under a national regulatory framework.

Most of these Bills deal with reforms that the first UPA Government, which was dependent on Left support, would have found difficult to push through. But this constraint did not apply to UPA-2, in which the Congress had more numbers than any single party enjoyed since 1996. There was nothing that stopped it from reaching out to the principal Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in thrashing out the differences coming in the way of the passage of these Bills. This shouldn’t have been too difficult, especially given how the two parties were able to arrive at an understanding over a Bill as contentious and divisive as the one on the creation of Telangana. The lesson the next government should learn from the legislative lows of the 15th Lok Sabha is to establish consultative mechanisms with major Opposition parties, at least those with whom some common ground can be found. This requires constant engagement and not just floor management when a Bill is to be voted upon. The experience of the last 20 years suggests the presence of a certain consensus among parties — more so the Congress and the BJP — over the need and inevitability of reforms. Minor differences are always reconcilable, provided the government of the day takes the lead.

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