Haryana govt limits ministers’ Question Hour replies to 50 words. Skirting accountability, says Oppn

Haryana Chief Secretary Sanjeev Kaushal has issued SOPs to all administrative secretaries of state govt for preparing replies to be given by their respective ministers in assembly.

File photo of Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khatter in the state assembly | ANI

Gurugram: The Haryana government has decided to limit its ministers’ written replies to questions posed in the state assembly to 50 words, a move decried by the Opposition as a sign of skirting accountability. 

Haryana Chief Secretary Sanjeev Kaushal has issued standard operating procedures (SOPs) to all administrative secretaries of the state government for preparing replies to be given by their respective ministers in assembly, which, among other things, include instructions to restrict these written responses to 50 words.

Kaushal’s order further states that if the reply has to exceed 50 words, it should be given “in the form of a statement to be laid on the table of the House”.

Opposition MLAs have termed this move as unreasonable and an attempt by the government to run away from accountability to the people.

Bharat Bhushan Batra, Congress MLA from Rohtak and chief whip of the party said this is unfair as well as impractical.

“As MLAs, we have been told to restrict our questions to be asked in the Vidhan Sabha during Question Hour to 150 words. Now, with these SOPs, the ministers will answer our questions in just one-third the length of our question,” Batra told ThePrint.

The Congress MLA said that the Question Hour during assembly sessions is one of the most important aspects after the budget where members from the Opposition get an opportunity to seek replies from the treasury benches on issues pertaining to their constituencies.

Often, he added, the problems of the constituencies of Opposition MLAs are addressed by asking questions about them in the assembly, but now the government wants to make Question Hour a “mere formality” by limiting the replies read out by ministers in the House to just 50 words.

Neeraj Sharma, another Congress MLA who represents Faridabad NIT in the Haryana assembly, termed the SOPs as “wrong” and “an attempt by the government to shun accountability”.

“What do they mean by the word limit? The Question Hour is all about Opposition members asking questions and members of the treasury benches giving replies. The reply can be 50 words, 500 words, or 5,000 words. The ministers are supposed to give replies. This only means that the BJP-JJP government wants to run away from giving replies to the questions asked by the Opposition,” Sharma told ThePrint.

He added that the Speaker is the guardian of the House and must intervene and see to it that this isn’t allowed to happen. 

Haryana Minister for Energy Ranjit Singh meanwhile said the SOPs would ensure the Question Hour passes off smoothly.

“Sometimes, the answers to the questions asked by the members are too long for the ministers to read. In many of these cases, the members ask supplementary questions too. Hence, it consumes a lot of time,” Singh told ThePrint.

The minister further said that it was in the best interest of the members too, because unless the oral replies were shorter, it wouldn’t be possible to answer all the questions during the Question Hour.

He said that the detailed statement was anyway tabled in the House for the members to read.

Contacted by The Print, Haryana Speaker Gian Chand Gupta said that there was nothing wrong with the SOPs and these were rather necessary for all questions to be answered in the short time available.

“We have 60 minutes for Question hour during which answers to 20 questions are to be given by the ministers. This way, each question gets just 3 minutes. If the answers are longer in duration, these will take too much time. Further, supplementary questions asked by the members also consume time. Unless we make the answers precise, it would become difficult for answers to all questions to be read out in the assembly,” said Gupta.

What else do the SOPs say

“In the just concluded budget session of Haryana Vidhan Sabha it has been noticed that there is no uniformity in replying to the assembly questions and the same requires some course correction,” reads the opening para of the chief secretary’s circular to administrative secretaries.

It also states that no reply should have tabulated figures or columns and rows, or graphs/bar diagrams unless the reply is enclosed in the statement laid on the table of the House. “This is logical because the content of a table cannot be read by the minister concerned while replying to the question in the Haryana Vidhan Sabha,” it adds.

The SOPs further state that the notes for the minister should be in four parts; the first part should be the text of the reply in Hindi, the second the text in English, the third with the background notes and the fourth part should contain likely supplementary questions and their draft replies.

The SOPs further say that the reply should be drafted ordinarily in Hindi and translated into English rather than the reverse. This would enable the officers drafting it to get the feel of the reply since the minister would ordinarily be replying in Hindi.

They further state that when a question has to be replied to by stating that the possibility of the issue raised is being considered or examined, there should not be any hesitation on the part of the administrative secretary, in replying to that extent, since consideration or examination do not tantamount to an assurance by the minister that the action concerned will be implemented/carried out.

“The reply should be precise and brevity in the drafting of the reply must be emphasised,” the SOPs state.

They further state that many of the questions are in two parts where the member asks the first part (Part A) on a particular work/project “about whether it has been decided by the government”, followed up by Part B, “if so, the details”.

On this, the SOPs say: “The reply to such a question, if in the negative, can be drafted by clubbing ‘A & B’ together and simply stating ‘No Sir’. Many times, the replies are drafted in Part-A as ‘No, Sir’ and then Part-B as ‘Question does not arise’. This second reply seems rude and consequently, is not liked by the member.”

The SOPs suggest that this can easily be avoided by clubbing Part ‘A’ and Part ‘B’ and stating ‘No, Sir’.

(Edited by Gitanjali Das)