Quality at Rs 500 a day?

Yes, criticise MPs for poor debates. But also think, they get little money, no incentive for policy research

Parliament’s monsoon session is another in a long series of reminders of how little time, attention and respect MPs give to serious legislative business. The nuclear deal apparently is serious enough to threaten the government’s survival but not serious enough to merit a substantive debate. Since MPs can’t talk about the issue, citizens would be right to wonder what the fuss is all about. Participation rates of MPs in parliamentary debates are extremely low. Studies of parliamentary proceedings in 2006 reveal that on average only 20 per cent of Lok Sabha MPs participated in legislative debates. Worse, 40 per cent of legislative bills were passed with less than one hour of debate.

This is the problem. What is the solution? We need to understand our MPs’ incentive structure. MPs have few incentives for good legislative performance. Elections are neither won nor lost on the basis of parliamentary performance. And political parties neither demand nor reward stand-out legislative speakers.

MPs’ incentives are also influenced by their workload and the resources they command. Yes, we are appalled by MPs’ conduct in Parliament. But let’s also acknowledge being an MP is a tough job. An average parliamentarian’s responsibilities range from legislative and oversight functions to party and constituency work. But the resources he commands are, by today’s standards, almost pitiful. This fact is rarely mentioned in critiques of MPs’ legislative performance.

Office expense allowances for Indian MPs are a paltry Rs 14,000 per month — that’s less than Rs 500 a day. Compare this with the United States. Each member of the House of Representatives, the Lower House, is entitled to an annual personal allowance of $632,355; he can hire up to 18 permanent and four part-time staff members. US Senators, members of the Upper House, get more: an annual allowance starting at $1,000,000 for hiring administrative staff and legislative aides and assistants who are responsible for researching legislative and policy issues, drafting legislation and liaisoning with constituents and lobbyist groups. Plus, the US Congress has its own public policy research arm — Congressional Research Service (CRS). CRS’s sole responsibility is to provide legislators with non-partisan analysis. The British parliament offers similar privileges to its MPs. A member of the House of Commons gets an annual staffing allowance of £ 90,000. Staff responsibilities include both constituency and parliamentary work.

How much difference do resources and staff make? Plenty, as has been discovered by two innovative civil society organisations that have for the last couple of years been working to provide MPs across party lines objective and thorough research and management support.

Founded in 2005, PRS Legislative Research is an independent research organisation that aims to strengthen parliamentary debate by analysing and demystifying legislative bills. So PRS produces short legislative briefs that articulate key issues and implications of bills to be tabled in parliament. These briefs are prepared after extensive research and consultations with experts and all the stakeholders. Once prepared, they are then mailed to all MPs. For this monsoon session, PRS launched an internship programme for college students to work with MPs to assist them in their parliamentary and legislative duties.

The second organisation is Democracy Connect. Starting out in 2004, Democracy Connect provided professional support to one first-time MP. From there it grew into a full-fledged support organisation. Democracy Connect today provides information and research to MPs by drawing on a pool of experts and volunteers from around the globe. It conducts interactive sessions and policy workshops. Experts are brought in at these meetings. The organisation has conducted sessions, demanded by MPs, on VAT, the rural employment guarantee programme, right to information and the tribal bill. It also offers a web-based service, the virtual policy cell, to respond to specific questions raised by interested MPs during Parliament sessions. Members are also offered assistance in dealing with development projects in their constituencies.

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MPs, we should appreciate even while criticising them, often get confusing signals from voters, political parties and the media about the nature of their role in policy-making and development. Some advisory help and some bridging of the resource gap can be very useful for them.

So how have MPs responded to these offers? Quite positively. Which is good news for Indian democracy. Democracy Connect has worked directly with as many 50 MPs from five political parties. Many of these MPs said participation in workshops encouraged them to speak in Parliament. PRS’s experience has been that many MPs get back in touch after reading the briefs sent to them. PRS also tracks MPs’ performance in Parliament to measure how they use the ‘study materials’.

These two experiments in increasing the resource base of our MPs demonstrate how badly parliamentary debate is affected by the absence of professional expertise and support services.

What can be officially done?

Parliament’s Library and Reference, Research, Documentation and Information Services (LARRDIS) offers an unexploited opportunity. LARRDIS now offers information and reference material to MPs but no serious analysis. Why can’t LARRDIS tie up with organisations like PRS and Democracy Connect to offer better support services along the lines of the American CRS? Through LARRDIS, Parliament can also initiate an internship and research assistants programme for MPs.

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Here we come back to the question of incentives. The challenge for any such programme is to sustain an MP’s interest in an environment plagued by perverse incentives.

As of now, as we argued before, neither electoral structure nor party practices offer MPs any reason to seriously prepare for parliamentary debates. Even if an MP had the back-up research service and the staff, would his incentive structure change substantively? We don’t know. But we should definitely want to find out.

The writer is a consultant working on issues of governance reform