Lack of legislative awareness and apathy of successive Governments has ensured that the number of sittings of Uttarakhand Vidhan Sabha in a year have never fulfilled the minimum mandatory requirement.
The House functioning rules of the Assembly mandate that at least 60 sittings of the legislature should be held in a year. But in Uttarakhand only 15 to 20 sittings usually take place in a year which is less than one third of the minimum required sittings. The rules however give overriding power to the assembly speaker on functioning of the house that has diluted the 60 day mandate.
The data of the Uttarakhand Vidhan Sabha show that maximum number of sittings so far has occurred in the year 2003 when 23 sittings were held during three sessions of the assembly.
Last year only 17 sittings of the assembly were organised. With the budget session of the assembly slated for only five days from March 3 to 7 this year, the numbers of sittings this year too are expected to be on the lower side. Usually the budget session of any assembly is of maximum duration and in states like Uttar Pradesh this session extends almost to a month.
In Uttarakhand the budget session is usually of eight days and this year with assembly slated to have only five sittings, the budget session of 2019 would be the shortest budget session in the history of Uttarakhand. It is worth mentioning here that the business of the house is decided by the government and in Uttarakhand the successive governments have failed to ensure enough business for the house during all these years. In an example of the apathy of law makers of the state one finds that very few original bills have been drafted and presented in Vidhan Sabha. Most of the bills which are tabled are amendments in the prevailing acts.
After the creation of the separate state of Uttarakhand from Uttar Pradesh, UP modifications and adaptations act, 2000 was passed along with state reorganisation act which gave powers to the new legislature to adopt existing acts of UP as such by replacing the name of UP with Uttarakhand.
After it the successive governments have focussed on bringing amendments in these adopted acts and brought very few original acts which would have elicited debates in the house.
The secretary of Uttarakhand Vidhan Sabha, Jagdish Chandra told The Pioneer that the issue of less sittings of assemblies was discussed during the recently held ‘ All India conference of presiding officers of legislatures’ in Dehradun and the unanimous view was that the prevailing law that there should not be a gap of more than six months between two sessions of assembly should be amended to reduce this gap to three months.
If this amendment is passed by the parliament then in place of existing three sessions, four sessions in a year would be organised which would result in increasing the number of sittings.