The Rajasthan Assembly has rejected Congress MLA Rafeek Khan’s question on the Rising Rajasthan Investment Summit, held in Jaipur in December, citing Rules of Procedure. As part of his Assembly question, Khan, the MLA from Adarsh Nagar in Jaipur, had asked for details of the Memorandum of Understanding signed during the summit, along with the details of the companies, the sector-wise breakup, and the amount. He also asked for details of the amount spent on the December summit and how much investment is expected in Rajasthan. He further asked how many people will get employment from the summit. A flagship event of the Bhajan Lal Sharma government, the Rising Rajasthan Global Investment Summit was held from December 9-11 last year, with the government claiming that MoUs worth Rs 35 lakh crore were signed as part of the initiative. The Assembly rejected Khan's question, which was listed for March 3. An official response to Khan said that the Assembly Speaker, Vasudev Devnani, rejected his question, citing section 37 (Conditions of admissibility of questions) under Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in the Rajasthan Legislative Assembly. Specifically, sub-section 2 (5) and (8) have been cited. As per sub-section 2, the right to ask a question is governed by certain conditions: The condition number 5 is that the question “shall not ask for an expression of opinion or the solution of an abstract legal question or of a hypothetical proposition” while condition number 8 is that “it shall not be of excessive length”. During the discussion on demands-for-grants of the Home Department on Monday, Khan said, “You are signing these big MoUs and then hiding your face when questions are asked about the MoUs and reject them. This will not work; you will have to answer before the public. You will have to answer here.” Meanwhile, the dedicated website of the summit has been inactive. Recently, Leader of Opposition Tika Ram Jully had accused the government of fudging the data, citing cases where the work was already underway before the summit, or even completed, yet MoUs were still done, allegedly to inflate the numbers. “The MoUs worth Rs 35 lakh crore are more than twice the state GDP. I would want them to be on the ground… but I have a responsibility to bring this information to the people of the state. There are some MoUs where there is no signature by one of the two parties, (there are companies) with a capacity of Rs 100 crore but they have signed an MoU of 1 lakh crore. Most importantly, the hotel where the summit was held in Bharatpur, an MoU of Rs 30 crore was signed for the same hotel…,” Jully had claimed.
