The monsoon session of Uttar Pradesh legislature will commence from August 20. The session will be held as per social distancing protocol for the COVID-19 pandemic as announced by the Central government.
The decision for the monsoon session of the assembly was taken by the state cabinet meeting held through circulation of the cabinet note in late hours of Saturday.
Sources said here on Sunday that the norms and guidelines would be decided later on and the state legislature would follow them like Parliament.
The new pandemic guidelines will be discussed in the all-party meeting held ahead of the each session of the state Assembly.
Assembly secretariat sources said to implement the social distancing protocol, the members of the Assembly were likely to be accommodated in the visitors and press galleries.
During the brief monsoon session expected to have 3-4 sittings, the UP legislature would pass the first supplementary budget of the current fiscal 2020-21 and around a dozen bills for which ordinances have been promulgated when the Houses were not in session.
The UP government, due to coronavirus pandemic, has borrowed heavily from the bonds market and by the end of last week of March, 2020, the government had raised over Rs 13,000 crore, which is 96 per cent of the total borrowings to be made by the state government during 2020-21. The money was drawn from the state contingency fund and the government needs to get the legislative approval for the recoupment of the state contingency fund.
The monsoon session is the constitutional obligation for the state government as there cannot be gap of six months or more between two sessions of the assembly. The budget session of the UP Assembly was adjourned sine die on February 28; hence the next session will have to be called before August 28.
UP Assembly Speaker Hriday Naryan Dikshit in June had indicated that the monsoon session of the state assembly could be held through video conferencing. He had, however, ruled out the possibility of holding hybrid session on the lines of British parliament.
In hybrid session, half of the members attend the House while rest of the members join the proceedings through video conferencing.
In April, the UK parliament achieved a historic first as the House of Commons held the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) in a ‘hybrid’ form, with around a dozen lawmakers physically present in the chamber and others tuning in online through giant screens set up to adhere to the social distancing norms in place to curb the spread of coronavirus.