PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly session was adjourned on Friday due to a lack of quorum without discussing a single item on agenda showing the members’ declining interest in proceedings despite undergoing parliamentary training in the United Kingdom and getting hefty pay raise since last year.

Deputy Speaker Prof Meher Taj Roghani adjourned the session, which lasted around 10 minutes.

Majority of the settings in the ongoing parliamentary year had to be adjourned due to lack of quorum.

On Friday when Qaumi Watan Party MPA Bakht Baidar Khan pointed out the lack of quorum, only 28 members were present in the house.

The chair asked the assembly’s staff members twice to ring bells but even then, the number of those in attendance stayed the same.

“Let’s take 15 minutes break! The number of participants will increase in the meantime,” she said after ringing the bells twice.

“Don’t take the break as we have to go to our respective villages,” Karak member and adviser to the chief minister on prisons Malik Qasim Khan reacted to the chair’s announcement.

MPA Anisa Zeb Tahirkheli wondered how the quorum issue would be addressed if 31 members were in attendance instead of the required 33.

The chair later adjourned the session until Monday.

According to Free and Fair Election Network, an NGO overseeing parliamentary affairs in the country, the KP Assembly has held 25 sittings in the current parliamentary year and 14 of them were adjourned due to a lack of quorum.

In Jan 2017, the house passed the KP Ministers (Salaries, Allowances and Privileges) (Amendment) Act, 2017, and KP Salaries, Allowances and Privileges Law (Amendment) Act, 2017.

Through both laws, the chief minister’s monthly salary went up from Rs40,000 to Rs200,000 and the ministers’ from Rs35,000 to Rs180,000 and MPAs’ from Rs18,000 to Rs80,000.

They and other lawmakers also claim several allowances.

During the ongoing session, the opposition lawmakers repeatedly expressed concern about the frequent adjournments due to a lack of quorum and absence of ministers.

They regretted that a question took many months and sometimes years to come on the agenda but it wasn’t taken up due to the session’s adjournment over a lack of quorum and it even lapsed due the absence of ministers.

In the last sitting on Tuesday, PPP MPA Fakhar Azam protested when the chair deferred his questions regarding the health department for the fourth time as health minister Shahram Khan Tarakai was absent.

When contacted, ANP parliamentary leader Sardar Hussain Babak blamed the lack of quorum on the government’s disinterest in the assembly and people’s problems.

He said if the cabinet members didn’t show up and no one responded to questions, then the members would definitely lose interest in the assembly.

The government has appointed treasury MPAs as parliamentary secretaries for each department but they too often absent themselves from the assembly’s sessions.

Published in Dawn, February 17th, 2018