Rajasthan: Our elected members worked for just 139 days in five years

The 14th legislative assembly of Rajasthan sat for a total of 139 days during its five year term, an average of 28 days per year. This was yet in aggregate 20 days more than the previous assembly. The statistics got highlighted as Association for  Democratic Reforms (ADR) released MLA performance report of the state assembly on Monday. 

During the term the assembly passed 145 of the 152 bills tabled and had 42,452 questions raised by the elected members. Most of these questions were limited to 10 departments and among these education department drew maximum 3325 number of questions.

The other categories to register a higher interest of the legislator members were Medical and health, Energy, Public health engineering and autonomous rules.

As the questions were spread across a number of departments and issues, a variation was also noticed in the performance of MLAs on party and individual basis. Of the 200 MLAs, 15 including the chief minister and several of her ministers did not had any question for the government. Interestingly leader of opposition Rameshwar Dudi also had no question raised either. Sapotra MLA from Congress, Ramesh Meena turns out to be the ahead of rest in questioning the government and has listed 678 questions. Heera Lal of BJP comes second with 641 questions while Congress chief whip Govind Singh Dotasra was fourth in the tally with 613 questions. 

There was also a disparity in questions raised by MLAs on party level, the smaller parties had a higher average of questions. The Zamidara Party had the highest average as just two of its MLAs asked 411 questions on average, seven independents had 399 questions on average, the main opposition party Congress was fourth in the list with 25 of its MLAs with an average of 206 questions each. Ruling BJP with 163 MLAs had an average of mere 185 questions. 

The report also evaluates upon the time taken by bills to be cleared at the assembly and finds than most of the tabled bills were cleared within a week, while one took more than three months. There were also five percent of the bills that could not be cleared during term of the assembly despite being tabled.

Business As Usual

• Most of these questions were limited to 10 departments and among these education department drew maximum 3,325 number of questions.
• In the 200-member house, 15 MLAs, including the chief minister and several of her ministers of her cabinet did not had any question for the government.