LAHORE: The Punjab Assembly on Friday passed the Sugar Factories (Control) (Amendment) Bill 2021 and five other bills bulldozing all rules of procedure and conventions amid protest by the opposition.

The chair being held by Panel of Chairman Mian Muhammad Shafi, in a rare move suspended the rules pertaining to taking up Question Hour and followed by Zero Hour immediately after recitation from the Quran and Na’at at the initiation of the house proceedings, and allowed the law minister to move and get passed six draft laws and introduce two more bills.

The bills passed were the Sugar Factories (Control) (Amendment) Bill 2021, the Companies Profits (Workers’ Participation)(Amendment) Bill 2020, the Punjab Overseas Pakistanis Commission Bill 2020, the Punjab Apprenticeship Bill 2021, the Punjab Educational Institutions (Reconstitution) Bill 2021, and the University of Child Health Sciences, Lahore Bill 2021.

The newly introduced bills were the Punjab Home-Based Workers Bill 2021, and the Punjab Shops and Establishments (Amendment) Bill 2021.

Like on May 4, when the Sugar Factories Bill 2021 had been passed without circulating its draft among the lawmakers or Press Gallery members, none of the bills passed today were circulated in the house.

The government kept the matters so secret that the agenda for the day was issued well after 9am, the time for starting house proceedings on Fridays. As per parliamentary convention, the agenda is released a day before so that legislators may come prepared accordingly.

Contrary to the Rule 5(1) of the Rules of Procedure, the chair also ignored the lack of quorum pointed out by the opposition, which was trying to use the ploy to delay the legislation for another day. The rush and secrecy shown by the government in getting the bills passed raised concerns among many who smell a rat particularly in the one related to the sugar industry.

Senior opposition lawmaker Samiullah Khan tells Dawn that the vested interests are having a field day in safeguarding their interests in the absence of standing committees, though the incumbent assembly is going to complete its third out of five years of life.

He says that almost 40 out of 60 bills including the six passed on Friday, enacted by the incumbent government, had the stamp of approval of special committees in which only three out of 15 members are from the opposition. These three also boycott proceedings of such ‘illegal’ bodies.

The six bills, he says, were presented before the Special Committee-9 as a formality in a brief sitting held a day ago (on Thursday) and till late night were not made part of the agenda for Friday’s sitting of the house.

Stressing that the government has mala fide intentions regarding the legislation, he says that the bills have been presented on the last day of the 32nd session which commenced on May 18 so that the members may not discuss these threadbare.

On May 4 sugar industry bill was contrary to an earlier ordinance which had protected rights of sugarcane growers by empowering the provincial government to fix a date for start of cane crushing season, binding payments to growers through formal banking channels and authorizing the cane commissioner to determine liability of a miller for payment of cane price within a specified time and in case of failure recover the amount as land arrears.

Published in Dawn, June 5th, 2021