The Budget Session of Punjab Vidhan Sabha turned out to be less about the financial matters of the state and more about political leaders settling scores with each other in the most acrimonious ways possible by making personal allegations. The session saw several duels taking place on the floor of the House which began with the Local Bodies Minister Navjot Sidhu exchanging harsh words with SAD leader Bikram Singh Majithia. The House saw more ugly scenes with former minister Rana Gurjit Singh and Leader of Opposition clashing verbally using the choicest of abuses. The tail end of the session was all about SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal hitting out at the Finance Minister Manpreet Badal and the latter responding with equal, if not more, force using caustic words and sarcasm. These happenings inside the House took place even as thousands of teachers of the state were protesting in Ludhiana demanding pending salaries since three months, regularisation of contractual teachers and pension for teachers recruited under Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan. Nearly 7,000 of them were booked after being lathi charged, while the session was taking place, but the issue failed to resonate in the House with the requisite seriousness. Attempts were made by SAD and AAP to highlight their plight, but no discussion took place on the issue. While the much awaited Narang Commission report and the Vidhan Sabha committee report on farmers’ suicides were tabled in the House, the treasury benches successfully avoided any discussion on them by introducing them at the fag end of the session. AAP MLAs tried to convince the Speaker to discuss these long awaited reports but the request was turned down on the pretext of paucity of time. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Brahm Mohindra said that these could be discussed in the next session while the LoP Sukhpal Khaira argued that the urgency would be lost after a period of six months. The demand raised by AAP MLAs for a special one-day session to discuss the two reports was also lost in the din in the House and did not attract any attention. The surreptitious introduction of the Punjab Social Security Bill 2018 which makes provision for new surcharges also did not let the opposition debate its provisions at length. The opposition has cried foul at the manner in which this bill was introduced and have questioned why these provisions were not included in the budget so that these could be adequately discussed. They levy of a new tax of Rs 200 generated some amount of heat in the house but the government’s justification that this tax was required to get loans on easy terms from Asian Development Bank seemed to have convinced the opposition ranks. The only participation of the majority of the MLAs in the proceedings of the House was through the questions that they put up during the session. The majority of questions were on health and education. These highlighted the concern that members of the House, cutting across party lines, had regarding the non-availability of schools and colleges in their areas and the absence of doctors and medical facilities from hospitals. While the Ministers of these departments gave exhaustive answers to all questions yet it was evident that there was a pressing need to discuss the education and health facilities in the state in greater detail.
