Standing committees letting off steam?

By S. Swaminathan

The Lok Sabha will complete the formalities involved in the approval of the Union Budget this week. In all, demands for grants of three ministries - Communications, Home Affairs and Human Resources Development - would be discussed by the Lok Sabha while the Rajya Sabha would have to be content with breezy or soporific proceedings on demands from three other ministries - Health and Family Welfare, Defence and External Affairs.

Budget proposals relating to all other ministries would be ``guillotined'' in the sense that the demands for grants would be taken as ``discussed'' and approved in an omnibus fashion. For puritans who would disapprove of such peremptory disposal of serious budgetary proposals, there is a ready device of pacification.

After all, Parliament's time is precious, is it not? What is even more to the point, with forty and odd political parties having their presence in Parliament and suffering from a compelling impulse to upstage one another, a lot of time is necessarily lost in procedural wrangles. All this perhaps has become the staple of our parliamentary culture. Was it in recognition of this inexorable listlessness of the Indian Parliament (for serious issues of development) that in the late Eighties, the concept of standing committees representing both houses of Parliament and attached to different ministries came to be adopted?

The major proposition advanced at that time was that these standing committees could scrutinise the budget proposals relating to the Ministries concerned in lieu of Parliament as a whole and make their findings available to Parliament and to the Government. The idea appeared eminently expedient at that time. In retrospect, however, the device of parliamentary joint committees seems to have contributed little to the process of parliamentary control over the budget and even less to the cause of providing a moulding or corrective impetus to the formulation of official policy relating to the different ministries.

Focus on policy rather than on budget

The parliamentary standing committees being ``House committees'' are governed by the mandate given by Parliament rather than terms of reference originating in the Constitution. Are they expected to examine budget proposals with reference to their adequacy in relation to perceived needs or in terms of their feasibility or administrative viability or in the economic/security/social/cultural context? It seems a difficult enterprise from whichever angle the task is looked at.

As against this ambiguity about the standing committees assignment, the evidence is almost overwhelming that these committees interpret their job as essentially that of reprimanding the Government of the day on its policy preferences.

Given the fact that a parliamentary standing committee represents in its forty odd members (drawn from the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha) a miniature of the multi-party composition of Parliament itself, it is not surprising that the report put out by the committee tends to be more polemical and less pragmatic. If, as it often happens, a few articulate ideologues (of the Left or the Right as the case may be) get the opportunity to mastermind the job of formulating the report for the majority of compliant passenger-members of the committee, there is little chance of the report being anything other than a rejectionist prescription in so far as official policy is concerned.

Stricutures for critique

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Petroleum and Chemicals, in its recent report, has literally censured the NDA Government for reducing the subsidy on kerosene and LPG. The Chairman of the committee is no less a political heavy-weight than Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav. What is the objection of the committee to the revision of kerosene and LPG prices? It has nothing to do with the fact of the eruption of international prices for crude during the last year and more. It is a much graver issue about the timing of the revision.

Was it proper for the Government to announce the decision after Parliament went into the recess following the presentation of the budget? And why was it that the Government did not consult the Standing Committee before taking the decision? (That no such committee with the Opposition inducted into it would have endorsed any proposal for raising the administered price of petroleum products much less kerosene, ``the fuel of the poor'' is, of course, plain common sense). The committee has not merely criticised the Government for raising the prices of kerosene and LPG. It has called for the immediate withdrawal of the decision as well!

On IT relief for exports

The Standing Committee on Commerce has found fault with the budget proposal for phasing out tax exemption on export profits. Interestingly enough, the Chairman of this committee is the former Minister of Commerce, Mr. Sikander Bakht of the BJP. What is the argument of the committee for preserving fiscal incentives for exports? It is the traditional protectionist approach which holds that Indian exporters, operating under transaction costs which erode their competitive strength, would find exports unviable in the absence of income-tax exemption.

That such incentives are not compatible with the WTO regime is not of much relevance for the Standing Committee! Why not cling to 100 per cent exemption of export profit under Sections 80 HHC and 80 HHE ``till an alternative scheme was worked out which would be compatible with the WTO stipulations'', asks the committee in its plaintive naivete!

It will be difficult to judge whether the Parliamentary Committee on Commerce has been guided by an all-too simplistic swadeshi credo or by a conviction that Indian exports are sustained only by the income-tax incentive!

Both the examples of standing committees cited here point to an outcome far different from that of facilitating (on the part of members of Parliament) a clear understanding of the budget proposals and their rationale.

It is perhaps an aberration that parliamentary standing committees tend to operate as fora for running down the Government rather than as active instruments for non-partisan critiques of the budget. Or is it all an exercise in what psychologists call ``catharsis''?

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