Patna, April 26: The average amount of time spent by your representatives in the Lok Sabha on your bills: five minutes.

According to the Citizen’s Report on Governance and Development 2010 released today, 27 per cent of the bills in 2009 were passed in less than five minutes in the Lok Sabha.

The annual report, prepared by National Social Watch, an organisation working to assess the governance and development process in India and inform the citizens, was released today at AN Sinha Institute by the chairman of Bihar Legislative Council, Tarakant Jha.

The chairman said: “The enormous loss of time in the Parliament is because the government does not want to listen to the Opposition. The furore over the joint parliamentary committee (JPC) is a classic example where the government after a month’s denial, finally agreed to the JPC. Why didn’t they agree initially and save precious time of both the Houses. Besides, it would be difficult to implement local self-government schemes in the coming years because of conflicts between the government and local bodies.”

The citizens’ report evaluates four key institutions of governance — the Parliament, the judiciary, the executive and local self-government. Amitabh Behar, representative of the National Social Watch present at the release, said: “The institutional health of all these components is declining in India. At the time of Nehru, Lok Sabha used to function for 150 days a year. In the current Lok Sabha, it has come down to 75 days. Discussion on important bills is done in minutes. For instance, the Lok Sabha passed the Special Economic Zones Bill in 30 minutes and a whole lot of noise was created later. Why was so little time devoted to such an important bill? Conflict of interests is another major issue like the appointment of Vijay Mallya, the owner of Kingfisher Airlines, as a member of the parliamentary standing committee on civil aviation.”

The report, on the functioning of the Parliament, notes disruptions leading to unscheduled adjournments as the biggest bane of the Indian Parliament. The winter session has witnessed a loss of over 30 per cent of the scheduled time of Lok Sabha and nearly 13 per cent of the Rajya Sabha, the report mentions. The number of bills passed has also declined from 47 in 2008 to 41 in 2009.

“Law making is a very important business of the Parliament. But ironically, both the Houses have spent less than one-fifth of their total time on legislative business in 2009. Member participation during the bill-passing session has also declined in the past, with 11 per cent in 2008 to 8 per cent in 2009,” said Himanshu Jha, another representative of National Social Watch.

The report not only scrutinises the assets of Lok Sabha members that have increased manifold but also states that their performance has almost no bearing on their popularity among the electorate. Among the top 10 performers in the 14th Lok Sabha, only four managed to return to the 15th Lok Sabha, the report states.

In the judicial section, the report states that the Supreme Court has received more than 24,000 PILs, of which only 226 were placed before judges and the rest rejected. Jha added that out of 43 sanctioned posts for judges in Patna High Court, 12 are currently vacant.

Under the local government watch, of 214 Centre-sponsored schemes, 115 schemes are still to be implemented at the panchayat level, the citizens’ report mentions.

“It is good that policies for social development at the grassroots level have been framed in India. But severe laggards in their implementation are observed in this report. Such reports will bolster social upliftment in India but integration of different levels of governance is inevitable for it,” said Dennis Rodgers, a senior research fellow from the University of Manchester, present at the release.