Daily Times

LAHORE: During the Punjab Assembly’s three-and-a-half parliamentary years, a traditional tussle between the representatives of democracy and state machinery was observed, as privilege of legislators was breached 31 times by bureaucrats, and thousands of questions were not replied to by the departments – violating rules.

Since the start of start of the PA’s fourth parliamentary year in June, only four sessions were held in which total 52 sittings and 36 actual sittings were observed. Actual sittings are defined as the parliamentary days when legislators hold proceedings sitting in their chambers and run the government or private business.

A total of 22 bills from the government were introduced during this time span, while 23 government bills were passed by the House with majority. While, two private member bills were referred to the standing committees concerned. The Punjab Assembly passed not a single private member’s bill.

Interestingly, privilege of the legislators was considered to have breached 31 times as per the notice received by the assembly secretariat, and 23 privilege motions were admitted out of which 16 were referred to the privilege committee for action.

Pertinent to mention here is that most of the privilege motions deal talk about “carelessness” of bureaucracy or government authorities for not cooperating with legislators. Most important thing is it that no serious action was taken against bureaucrats on such motions and committees concerned resolved the issues by patching up between both the parties amicably.

Till December 2016, as many as 114 resolutions were admitted by the Speaker’s Office in which only 15 were passed by the House. It is worth mentioning that around 10,000 starred and unstarred questions were submitted in the assembly secretariat but only half of these were answered.

It should be remembered that most of the legislators were unsatisfied with the progress of the departments when it comes to time taken by the departments to reply to questions.

Though the House had started Zero Hour to raise any question of urgency, and as many as 88 notices (questions) were received by the Speaker’s Chamber in which 60 were approved, unfortunately only 19 were answered.