No more cell phones inside Parliament

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, MARCH 7. For weeks, months and years the pleas of the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha fell on deaf ears. But now, what the MPs refused to do, a small gadget acquired by the Speaker will force them to.

Members of Parliament were undeterred and continued to carry their mobile telephones into the two Houses when they were in session, and worse still, they did not bother to even switch them off.

The result was they rang, distracting from the solemnity of the proceedings. And finally, the matter reached an intolerable limit when during the President's address to the joint sitting at the start of this Budget session, mobile telephones rang as many as six times.

Today, the Speaker called a meeting of party leaders and informed them that he was getting some equipment installed to jam mobile telephone signals. In any case, he reminded party leaders, members are not allowed to bring mobile telephones into Parliament House, but clearly they had been violating that order. And worse, even after on a couple of occasions handsets were confiscated when they rang, MPs continued to carry them into the Houses without bothering to switch them off.

There was no difficulty getting the consent of party leaders, and immediately after the meeting this afternoon, the small VCR-like equipment was plugged on to jam all mobile signals inside the chambers of the two Houses and the adjoining lobbies. Mobile telephones can no longer ring inside Parliament.

Apparently, the equipment cost about Rs 70,000 and it can be moved about to wherever it is needed. The equipment has already been tested to ensure that it will not interfere with the wireless sets of the security men and the Doordarshan signals for telecasting of Parliament proceedings. The Speaker and the Chairman will now have less reason to lose their cool.

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Section  : National
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