MP Government Considers Discontinuation of MLA Allowance for Disrupting House

Bhopal: In a bid to ensure the hassle-free working of the Madhya Pradesh Assembly and improve the sitting figure of the house, the Congress government is mulling over a proposal to block the allowance of those legislators who disrupt the proceedings of the House.

A proposal in this regard has been sent by the Department of Legislative Affairs to the Chief Minister Kamal Nath and soon a bill will be tabled in the House.

According to the sources, the decision of government is intended to build pressure on MLAs, especially those from the Opposition, who create commotion in the House. The opposition - BJP- in the present state Assembly is quite powerful with 109 MLAs while the ruling Congress has 114 MLAs. 

The upcoming assembly session is going to start from January 7, 2019. 

Daily Allowance More Than Salaries?

During the BJP government, an amendment in the act related to salaries and allowances of the MLAs was made and it was provisioned that MLAs would be paid daily allowance subject to their presence in the House. The provision for not giving allowance to MLAs for disrupting House proceedings has come up for the first time.

An MLA is currently entitled to get a daily allowance of Rs. 1,500 during Assembly session. According to a media report, which was written on the basis of RTI, Rs. 149 crore were paid from the state treasuries in salaries and allowances to 231 legislators in the last five years. The allowances were over three times the salary bill.

In a reply to an RTI filed by the RTI activist Chandrashekhar Gaud, the Assembly Secretariat said that the salary bill of MLAs between April 2013 to September 2018 was Rs. 32.03 crore, while they were paid Rs. 117 crore in various allowances in the same period.
 

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The Congress in its ‘Vachan Patra’ (Manifesto) has promised to bring a law against those MLAs who disrupt the House proceedings and stop their allowance. For the compliance of the same, a bill would be brought in the House to amend the Act related to salaries and allowances of MLAs.

Decline in Assembly Sittings

The Madhya Pradesh Assembly has been witnessing a steady decline in the number of sittings every year. The Assembly is barely having an average of 30 days of sittings a year in the past one-and-a-half decades.

The previous assembly Speaker Sitasaran Sharma had also shown concern about this trend, blaming the disruptions in the House for the recurring disruptions, and called for course correction.

From last 15 years, the BJP was in power in Madhya Pradesh and Congress was in opposition. Official data suggests that sittings of the Assembly have been gradually dropping in the past three decades.

According to the data available on the Madhya Pradesh Vidhan Sabha website, in the last 15 years of the BJP rule, the first term of the government - between 2003 and 2008 - witnessed just 158 days of Assembly sittings. The second term - between 2008 and 2013 - saw 167 meetings. And, in the third term (2013-1018), 134 Assembly meetings had been organised before the last monsoon session prior to the elections in November.

The Congress, then in Opposition, had blamed the ruling BJP government for the drop in the sittings, saying the ruling dispensation appeared unwilling to face the Opposition’s questions in the House, which often led to curtailment in days for legislative work.

In a turn of events, the BJP, which is now in the Opposition, has termed this upcoming bill as a move to silence the Opposition.
 

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