Goodbye to the winter session of Parliament ?  

The Cabinet Committee on Parliamentary Affairs (CCPA), which is expected to take a decision on convening the winter session of Parliament, has not met so far. And no one in the Government is willing to hazard a guess when CCPA might meet.

The winter session of Parliament usually commences by the third week of November. ButLok Sabha Speaker Om Birla was at Kevadia, Gujarat, on November 26, hosting the President and the Vice President for ‘Constitution Day’. Birla and Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu, who is also Chairman of Rajya Sabha, are reported to be in favour of clubbing the winter session with the budget session and convene Parliament some time towards the end of January .

Since a two-week notice is customarily given for convening a Parliament session, the winter Session, in all likelihood, has been jettisoned. The opposition, therefore, have been denied another opportunity to question the government on the pandemic, the economic crisis, Chinese incursion in Ladakh and on the farmers’ agitation.

In the truncated Monsoon session this year, both houses of Parliament met only for four hours a day. The mandatory Question Hour was done away with for paucity of time, and the Houses were adjourned sine die one week early, on the ground that Parliament had no business to transact and because the capital city was in the grip of a raging pandemic. The fact that 40 odd MPs out of 400 or more attending the session, had been infected during the session has given the Government yet another pretext to postpone the winter session.

Despite extreme level of precautions, over 40 MPs contracted the virus during the session. The RS chairman M Venkaiah Naidu too tested positive after the session. Three Members of Parliament who had not attended the session, namely Rajya Sabha MP Ashok Gasti, Tirupathi MP B Durga Prasad and Kanyakumari MP H Vasanthakumar died due to post COVID-19 complications.

It will go down as the most unusual session with one House sitting in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Members occupied both the chambers and even the galleries. All outside entry was blocked, and the media was barred. With the presiding officers in chair in their respective House, members sitting in the other chamber participated in the proceedings digitally.

The year 2020 will thus record one of the lowest number of sittings in a year.

Interestingly, Parliament is witnessing not just fewer sittings, but also fewer sessions. But since rulesmaintain there should not be a gap of more than six months between two sessions, there is little urgency and the government is not under any pressure to convene the winter session because the Monsoon session ended in September.

In 1991, there were six sessions of Parliament in one year. There have been seven years when there were five sessions each year;There were four sessions each year in as many as 31 years after Independence and 27 years when there were three sessions each.

The Houses did not have a Winter Session in 1975, 1979 and 1984. In March 2020, the Budget Session was cut short as coronavirus cases rose and a nationwide lockdown was imposed. The Monsoon Session was also called off.

The delay in commencing winter session will also impact tabling of the 15th Finance Commission report which is scheduled to be tabled before Parliament and help state governments understand their share in the devolution of central funds for the next five years.

The commission headed by former bureaucrat and ex-Rajya Sabha member, N.K. Singh has already handed over the report to President Ram Nath Kovind, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. But, until it is tabled in the Parliament, its contents can’t be made public and state governments would continue to remain in dark about their share of taxes.