Rajya Sabha - A level playing field : Venkaiah monitoring the House well

The first of it's kind analysis undertaken by the Rajya Sabha secretariat revealed that different parties got their due share of opportunities of participation, under various windows during the first part of the Budget Session that concluded on the 11th of this month.

The analysis, done further to the Chairman of the House M.Venkaiah Naidu, desiring to know if the parties were getting equitable opportunities in the Council, confirmed fair and proportional share for different parties with the Opposition getting slightly more in the total 1,460 opportunities, sources revealed.

Accordingly, BJP with 82 members accounting for 34% of the strength of 239 of the House got 480 opportunities amounting to 33% of the total. Congress with 46 members constituting 19% of the strength got 345 opportunities which comes to 24% share of the total.

The 10 recognised parties with five members and above each with a total of 190 members accounting for 80% of the strength of the Council got about 81% of the total opportunities.

Others including regional parties and independents amounting to 20% of the membership of the House got 19% share of participation indicating broad correspondence between the strength and share of opportunities.

The 8 non-NDA parties, featuring among the 10 recognised parties together got a higher share of opportunities in proportion to their strength.

Besides BJP that got 1% lesser share, JDU could avail 0.55% of total chances of participation as against it's strength of 2.51% in the House, primarily due to none of it's members getting any Unstarred Questions listed during the session.

Among the opposition and non-NDA parties, Congress, TMC, AIADMK got proportionally higher opportunities while BJD, DMK, TRS and CPM got their due share. Only SP got a lesser share.

During the session, 107 members participated in the Question Hour, 100 took part in the two debates on the Motion of Thanks to the President and the General Budget, 76 Zero Hour and 33 Special Mentions were made, 24 participated in the lone discussion on a Private Member's Bill besides 1,120 Unstarred Questions of 118 members replied in writing.

This makes the zone of opportunities of participation as 1,460. Equity of participation was analysed against this window of total opportunities of participation.

The analysis however, revealed that members from the regional parties outshined others in respect of overall individual performances. 18 members from regional parties (60%) were among the top 30 performers while 8 from BJP 4 of Congress accounted for the remaining 40%, the sources revealed.