There is a possibility of the monsoon session being held in the new Parliament building.
NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the under-construction new Parliament building last week to take stock of the work being done. It is expected that the monsoon session of Parliament this year, which is scheduled for July-August, will be held in the new Parliament building.
According to sources, the Parliament building is almost complete and the finishing work is being done to ensure that the next session of Parliament sits in the new building. Sources also said that the majority of the work in the new Parliament House has been completed and both chambers of the House (Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha) are ready, with some final work being left that would be completed in a month or two. Amidst all the din against the need for the new Parliament building that was envisaged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there have been requests to the government by many, both in the ruling as well as in the Opposition, due to the crumbling infrastructure of the old and existing building, that not only lacks infrastructure, but also lacks seating space within the House, where MPs have to jostle around to get in and out of their seats.
The new Parliament building, which will have 770 seats in the Lok Sabha and 530 seats in the Rajya Sabha, gives an opportunity to increase the number of public representatives in Parliament, keeping in mind the growing population of India. Currently, the Lok Sabha has 545 members representing more than 1.4 billion people, while the Rajya Sabha has 250 members.
The appropriation of the Lok Sabha seats was last done in 1977 on the basis of the 1971 census and at the time, on an average, every Lok Sabha member represented 10 lakh voters. However, that has changed massively and now, on an average, an MP represents 20-25 lakh people. A Lok Sabha MP of Bihar represents 25 lakh voters, while an MP from Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh represents 30 lakh voters. As of today, the smallest five Lok Sabha seats have 8 lakh voters between them, while the largest five have almost 1.3 crore voters. However, what has to be factored in is the need to ensure that states that have managed to stabilise or even reduce their population should not be penalised, while states that witnessed population explosion get rewarded. States that have performed well in stabilising their populations have usually done similarly in metrics of economic growth, while those where the population has climbed sharply have recorded more dismal per capita growth parameters. This was a key consideration behind the decisions of successive governments to keep the seat numbers stable. An option being talked about is to raise the number of seats while keeping the proportion of seats between different states roughly the same.
The Constitutional fathers had inserted Article 82 into the Constitution which stipulates for reallocation of a revised number of Lok Sabha seats after every census, based on updated population figures. Until 1976, after every census, a Delimitation Commission was set up to carve out constituencies based on the latest census, as Article 82 had called for.
However, the Forty-Second Constitutional amendment enacted in 1976—which was brought during the Emergency period by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi—suspended the revision of seats until after the 2001 Census. Twenty-six years later, in February 2002, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government delayed the reallocation further by passing the Eighty-Fourth Amendment and extending the freeze on delimitation until 2026. In this manner, inter-state justice and harmony was maintained.
As things stand, the next delimitation of constituencies is likely to take place after the freeze ends in 2026 and will be based on the first census post the freeze that will take place in 2031. It is only after this that the number of seats in Parliament can be increased.
Many MPs that this correspondent spoke to said that the need of the hour was to expand the Parliament building as the old building was crumbling under its weight and that MPs in India were representing too many people.
One BJP MP, who did not wish to be quoted, told this correspondent, “It is insane when we realise the number of people we represent in Parliament. It is not even possible for an MP to tour his entire constituency, including all the villages and gram panchayats in five years, then how do you expect to fulfil all their wishes? Some of our voters cannot even come and meet us, because they stay in remote places. The MPLAD (MP Local Area Development Fund) given is too little for the vast area we cover. It is practically impossible to represent so many people and so many voices at one go.” The good news is that the growth of online access and social media has ensured that distances no longer represent as much of a hindrance to close contact as was the case earlier. Under the Modi dispensation, such access is on the way to being made universal among the population.
The existing Parliament building was built to seat 300 members, with the erstwhile building having no air-conditioning system, no audio system no telephone lines, no firefighting system, etc, which eventually got retrofitted into the building. This has caused immense stress to the existing structure and pipes, wires, cable lines are all pushed to the corners, trying to be hidden from eyesight causing another reason of concern for the staff as they face difficulty in finding the fault on several occasions.
Moreover, unlike the global practice, MPs do not have their respective offices within the Parliament building which was needed to be given to them, but due to the crunch in space, it became difficult to hand them that space. The Parliament building added two more floors into the existing structure sometime in the 1960s and only that much could be done to the almost 100-year-old building.
The architects of the new Parliament building and the government have said that the old Parliament building would be restored and would in fact act as an extension of the new Parliament building. MPs and their constituents are waiting eagerly for the new structure to become operational.