Parliament, Legislatures & the Executive — UPSC CSE Mains GS2

Weightage: high yield, and the subject where hard, citable data is most readily available — declining sittings, falling committee referral rates and shrinking debate time give this topic the kind of evidence most GS2 answers lack.

1. What Parliament is actually for

The most common weak answer in this subject treats Parliament as a law-making body and evaluates it on how many laws it passes. That framing misses the constitutional design. In a parliamentary system the executive is drawn from and sustained by the legislature, and normally commands a majority in it — which means the legislature can rarely block a determined government's legislation and was never primarily expected to. Parliament's distinctive function is accountability: forcing the executive to explain, justify, and answer for its actions in public, on the record, before it acts and after.

This is why the examinable topics in this subject cluster where accountability happens — question hour, committee scrutiny, debate on bills, the budget process, and no-confidence motions — rather than around procedural detail for its own sake. And it is why measures of Parliament's health are measures of scrutiny rather than of legislative output: a Parliament passing many bills quickly with little examination is functioning worse, not better, than one passing fewer with real scrutiny.

2. Committees: where scrutiny actually happens, and its measurable decline

Parliamentary committees do the detailed work the floor cannot. The house sits for limited days, debates are time-bound and often disrupted, and members speak on party lines. Committees meet in private, sit across party lines, take evidence from officials and experts, and examine clauses in detail — which is why they are frequently described as "mini-Parliaments" and why their functioning is the single best indicator of legislative scrutiny.

The main types are worth distinguishing: Departmentally Related Standing Committees, which examine bills, budgets and the working of specific ministries; Financial Committees — the Public Accounts Committee, which examines the Comptroller and Auditor General's reports and is conventionally chaired by a member of the opposition, the Estimates Committee, and the Committee on Public Undertakings; and ad hoc committees including Select and Joint Committees constituted for a specific bill.

The decline in committee scrutiny is where this topic's most citable evidence sits. The proportion of bills referred to committees fell from around 71% in the 15th Lok Sabha (2009–14) to about 27% in the 16th (2014–19) and roughly 16% in the 17th (2019–24). Over the same broad period, sittings declined: the 17th Lok Sabha held around 274 sittings, the lowest for any full-term Lok Sabha, against an average of roughly 70 days a year over the past decade compared with 120–140 days in the 1950s. Debate time has contracted correspondingly. A candidate who cites even two of these figures is doing something most answers on this topic do not.

3. The anti-defection law and its unintended consequences

The Tenth Schedule, inserted by the 52nd Amendment (1985), disqualifies a legislator who voluntarily gives up membership of their party or votes against the party whip. Its purpose was to end the era of frequent floor-crossing that had destabilised governments.

Two features have proved problematic, and a strong answer engages both rather than treating the law as straightforwardly good or bad.

The first concerns the exception. As originally enacted, paragraph 3 exempted a "split" where one-third of a legislative party broke away together — intended to protect genuine collective dissent, but in practice it became the operating mechanism for engineered defections in bulk rather than a safeguard. The 91st Amendment (2003) deleted this provision and raised the threshold for a protected merger to two-thirds, closing the one-third route.

The second concerns the adjudicator. Disqualification is decided by the Speaker or Chairman, an officeholder who in practice belongs to a political party and whose continuation in office often depends on the majority whose interests the decision affects. In Kihoto Hollohan v. Zachillhu (1992), the Supreme Court upheld the Tenth Schedule's validity but held that the Speaker acts as a tribunal in these proceedings and that the decision is therefore subject to judicial review — while declining to permit review before a decision is made. This left a specific gap: because no timeline is prescribed for deciding a petition, a Speaker can achieve a political outcome simply by not deciding, and judicial review of a decision never taken is unavailable. Proposals to transfer the adjudicatory function to the Election Commission or to a judicial body, and to prescribe a fixed decision timeline, follow directly from this diagnosis.

The deeper criticism is that the law achieves stability at the cost of deliberation. A legislator bound to vote as the party directs on every matter cannot exercise independent judgment on the merits, which weakens exactly the scrutiny function described in Section 1 — several commentators accordingly propose restricting the whip's application to confidence motions and money bills, preserving government stability while restoring independent voting on ordinary legislation.

4. Routes around scrutiny: ordinances and money bills

Two constitutional provisions permit legislation with reduced parliamentary examination, and both are recurring question topics.

The ordinance power under Article 123 (and Article 213 for Governors) allows the executive to promulgate law when Parliament is not in session and immediate action is necessary. An ordinance has the same force as an Act but must be laid before Parliament and ceases to operate six weeks after reassembly unless approved. The constitutional concern is not the power itself — genuine emergencies arise between sessions — but re-promulgation, the practice of reissuing an ordinance repeatedly to keep it alive without securing parliamentary approval. In Krishna Kumar Singh v. State of Bihar (2017), a seven-judge bench held that re-promulgation constitutes a fraud on the Constitution and subverts the democratic legislative process, and further held that the satisfaction of the President or Governor in promulgating an ordinance is not immune from judicial review.

The money bill route raises a distinct issue. Under Article 110, a money bill is confined to specified financial matters, and the Speaker's certification that a bill is a money bill is stated to be final. The consequence is procedural: the Rajya Sabha can only recommend amendments to a money bill, which the Lok Sabha may reject, and cannot block it. The controversy concerns bills certified as money bills whose contents extend beyond Article 110's enumerated categories, which has the effect of bypassing the upper house's scrutiny on matters outside the financial domain the exception was designed for.

5. The executive: structure and answerability

The President is the constitutional head, elected indirectly by an electoral college of elected members of Parliament and of state legislative assemblies. Under Article 74, the President acts on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers — advice that the 42nd Amendment made explicitly binding, with the 44th Amendment adding the power to require the Council to reconsider once, after which the reconsidered advice binds. The genuine discretionary space is therefore narrow, arising mainly in appointing a Prime Minister when no party has a clear majority, and in the pocket-veto possibility under Article 111, which prescribes no timeline for assent to a bill.

The Council of Ministers is collectively responsible to the Lok Sabha under Article 75(3) — the provision that makes the whole system accountable, since it means the executive survives only while it retains the confidence of the elected house. The 91st Amendment capped the Council's size at 15% of the strength of the Lok Sabha (or state assembly), addressing the practice of enlarging ministries to secure political loyalty.

The permanent executive — the civil services — implements policy under ministerial direction, and the constitutional division is that ministers are answerable to Parliament for policy while civil servants are answerable to ministers for implementation. The tension in practice, examined further in the governance subject, is that this division assigns political responsibility for outcomes to ministers who did not implement, and implementation responsibility to officials who cannot be questioned in Parliament.

Worked example 5.1 (illustrating a full 15-mark GS2 answer). "Parliamentary committees have been called 'mini-Parliaments'. In light of recent trends, examine whether they are fulfilling this role. (15 marks, ~250 words)"

Model answer. The description rests on a genuine functional claim. Committees do the detailed scrutiny the floor cannot: they meet away from the public gaze and party posturing, sit across party lines, take evidence from officials and domain experts, and examine legislation clause by clause. The Public Accounts Committee's convention of an opposition chairperson institutionalises adversarial financial scrutiny, and Departmentally Related Standing Committees provide continuous oversight of ministries between sessions.

Recent trends indicate this role is being substantially under-used. The proportion of bills referred to committees has fallen sharply — from roughly 71% in the 15th Lok Sabha to about 27% in the 16th and approximately 16% in the 17th — meaning the large majority of legislation now reaches the floor without committee examination. Sittings have contracted in parallel, with the 17th Lok Sabha recording around 274 sittings, the fewest of any full-term Lok Sabha, and average annual sitting days roughly half those of the 1950s. Since referral is not mandatory and rests substantially on the presiding officer's discretion at the government's instance, the government of the day effectively controls whether its own legislation is scrutinised.

The committees themselves retain structural strengths: they still produce detailed reports, and their recommendations, though non-binding, carry weight where accepted.

The accurate assessment is that committees remain capable of the mini-Parliament role but are increasingly not asked to perform it. The targeted correction follows from the diagnosis: making referral of bills the default, with reasons recorded for any exception, would restore the function without requiring any new institution.

Common traps UPSC sets here

• Evaluating Parliament by legislative output rather than by scrutiny — more bills passed faster is evidence of weaker examination, not stronger performance.
• Discussing committee decline without citing the referral percentages or sitting counts — this is the rare GS2 topic where hard numbers are available, and omitting them wastes the advantage.
• Treating the anti-defection law as simply good (stability) or simply bad (stifles dissent) — engage both the merger-threshold history and the Speaker-as-adjudicator problem.
• Citing Kihoto Hollohan as settling the Speaker question — it permitted review of a decision but left the no-timeline gap, which is where the live problem sits.
• Describing the President's powers without noting Article 74's binding advice — the discretionary space is narrow and specific, not general.

Memory aids

• "Scrutiny, not output" — the frame for every Parliament question.
• "71 to 27 to 16" — the committee referral collapse across three Lok Sabhas.
• "One-third became two-thirds in 2003" — the 91st Amendment's merger-threshold fix.
• "Reviewable, but only once decided" — the Kihoto Hollohan gap in five words.
• "Re-promulgation is a fraud on the Constitution" — Krishna Kumar Singh (2017) in one line.
• "Advice binds, reconsideration once" — Articles 74 as amended by the 42nd and 44th.

Exam protocol

• Frame Parliament questions around the accountability function before discussing any specific mechanism.
• Cite at least one hard figure — referral rate, sitting count, or debate hours — in any question on parliamentary decline.
• For anti-defection questions, separate the merger-threshold issue from the adjudicator issue, since they have different remedies.
• Name Kihoto Hollohan and Krishna Kumar Singh for defection and ordinance questions respectively, stating what each actually held.
• Close with a targeted institutional fix (default referral with recorded reasons, a fixed timeline for Speaker decisions) rather than a call for better parliamentary conduct.