LAHORE: The Punjab Assembly on Wednesday must have improved upon its own record of thin attendance when it started proceedings with 15 members, and its total strength throughout the day never went beyond 30 odd members – less than one-third of the requirement to run the House.

Had proceedings not delayed by 50 minutes, the attendance could have been even thinner.

The numerical weakness of the House directly reflected in business of the House when the Question Hour ended in 10 minutes.

Out of 16 questions on women development and labour and human resource, only two movers were found in the House, but their questions were deferred as answers had not reached the House. The movers of rest of the questions were not in attendance and disposed of quickly. The entire hour was thus spent in 10 minutes.

Next came turn of the privilege motion and speaker was told there were no motions. The House quickly moved to adjournment motions but movers of the most of them were missing and it hardly took 15 minutes to run through them.

As soon as the official business started, which was third day of pre-budget discussion (soliciting suggestions from legislators), the House had lost even more members. Those in the House started noisy banters and repeatedly attracted admonitions from the chair. The speaker had to call five absentees before he found first speaker in Mian Rafique of the PML-N. The Mian only pointed out the futility of the entire exercise by saying that when House had 142 members, it had four-day pre-budget discussion. “Now it has 371 members, but the House still has only four days to make suggestions for the budget. Each member is given five minutes to explain what he expects of the budget and also contribute to making of it. Does it make sense?”

As soon as he sat down, next six speakers, who had given their names for participation, were also found missing. Seventh speaker, Ziabun Nisa of the PML-N, hardly took two minutes to read an eulogy of her leadership before quitting the mike.

What made the matter worse was that the demand for increase in emoluments of the assembly staff, and more importantly of the members, also came back to the House. The members were told that new legislation would be required in this regard and the law department has already been moved for the same.

The opposition was conspicuous by its absence as only one of its members remained in the House with second one (Waqas Hassan Moakal), joining much later in the day. The chair adjourned the listless proceedings around 1:50pm for the Thursday morning.

“This is the House, which costs around Rs14 million a day, and what they do for the whole day,” someone quipped in the corridors.

With only 10 per cent of members attending the House, they still have the cheek to ask for more money for “their services” and government promises to oblige.

Published in Dawn, April 2nd, 2015

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