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How much it costs to run the Parliament

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI JUNE 24. When Members of Parliament squander away precious time, taxpayers see good, hard-earned money going down the drain, especially because a truly representative multi-tier democracy is an expensive affair.

According to the first ever "Citizen's Report On Governance and Development 2003'', inflation, high salaries and perquisites for MPs and Parliament's widening scope of activities have together pushed the cost of Parliament resulting in a steady increase in its annual budget.

Over the years, some attempt has been made to determine the cost of Parliament on a per minute or per hour basis. The earliest such assessment was made in 1951 when the provisional Parliament was informed that the Question Hour cost the Exchequer Rs. 6,000 or Rs. 100 a minute.

In 1966, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi told Parliament that based on the budgetary allocation for the Lok Sabha, the hourly cost of the proceedings in that House was Rs. 18,000 or Rs. 300 a minute. This was calculated by the annual budgetary allocation for the Lok Sabha by the number of sittings per year.

Since then the formula applied to determine the cost of Parliament has undergone a change. The formula now in vogue is to divide the total budgetary allocation for the two Houses by the notional number of working days in a year. Applying this formula, it was estimated that the per minute cost of Parliament (both Houses) was Rs. 2,570 in 1993.

The ratio of the budgets of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha is 6:4 and the per hour cost during fiscal 1992-93 was Rs. 92,520 for the Lok Sabha and Rs. 61,680 for the Rajya Sabha. This works out to approximately Rs. 1,500 per minute for the Lok Sabha and Rs. 1,000 per minute for the Rajya Sabha.

More recently, the Lok Sabha Secretariat has estimated that the cost of the Lok sabha in the fiscal year 2000-01 was Rs. 15,700 per minute.

Over the past decade, the budgetary allocations for the two Houses of Parliament have been on the rise. In 1990-91, it was Rs. 277.20 million. This had risen during the 2000-01 fiscal year to Rs. 1.73 billion -- a 700 per cent jump over a ten-year period.

According to an assessment made by Common cause, an NGO, the cost of running both Houses of Parliament works out to Rs. 17,000 per minute. This amounts to about Rs. 10 lakhs per hour and Rs. 75 lakh per day. Needless to say, all the expenses are ultimately born by the citizens who pay taxes.

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