How the system makes allowances for MPs to attend GST session

Members of Parliament have found a novel way to ‘reward’ themselves for participating in the Centre’s gala midnight event on Friday to launch the Goods and Services Tax (GST).

Since the MPs would not qualify for a sitting fee or a travel allowance for the special sitting, more than two dozen department-related standing committees and other panels of Parliament are meeting on Thursday and Friday. This way, the MPs become eligible for the full travel allowance to attend the committee meeting and for the ₹2,000 sitting allowance. The Centre’s programme will begin at 11 pm on Friday and will go up to 12.15 am on Saturday.

‘Inadequate planning’

A senior MP and a chairman of a key panel told

BusinessLine on condition of anonymity that both the Centre and the Parliament secretariat had made inadequate arrangements for the programme.

“They could have held the programme with a proper summons from the Lok Sabha Speaker and the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha. They sent an invitation to each MP to attend the programme, but there was no assurance of a travel allowance or of sitting fees. None of the parties has issued whips.

“The Parliamentary Affairs Ministry and top BJP leaders informally approached the committee heads with a request that meetings be scheduled on June 29 and 30, and most of us obliged,” the senior MP said.

A full house

Some of the panels have not met in the past month. Since there are about 24 meetings on Friday, almost all the meeting halls and smaller lecture halls in Parliament House, Annexe and Library buildings have been booked. Some panels are meeting in the Chairman’s chambers since they could not find any other space.

The Committee on Energy, the Joint Committee on Office of Profit, the panel on Government Assurances, the Committee on Papers Laid on the Table, the Petitions Committee, the Railway Convention Committee, the Water Resources Committee, and the Committee on Welfare of Other Backward Classes are meeting at the rooms allocated to the chairpersons of the panels. The Defence Standing Committee, which held its last meeting on May 25, is meeting at the lecture hall in the Parliament Library Building on Friday.

No specific agenda

Members were told the panel, headed by veteran BJP leader BC Khanduri, will “discuss future course of action of the Committee”.

The Rural Development Committee will also meet after a gap of one month at its chairman P Venugopal’s chamber to discuss the “future course of action.”