Parliament sets up mother of all committees

NEW DELHI: Parliamentary committees have mushroomed in the past few years, covering everything from major ministries to salaries of MPs. They even appear to be duplicating each other''s work. So how does Parliament go about setting things right? You guessed it. By appointing yet another committee. Chaired by veteran Congressman Pranab Mukherjee, the job of the latest parliamentary committee is to examine if there is any `overlap'' in the mandate for each committee.Asked recently by The Times of India Online if he thought there were too many committees, Mukherjee said: ``How can I come to a conclusion before the committee begins work?'''' The new committee - in some ways, the mother of all parliamentary committees - began life a couple of months ago as a little sub-committee of the Rajya Sabha''s General Purpose Committee. But as it got into the act, it found that the other House too had to be involved. So in consultation with Lok Sabha Speaker G M C Balayogi, Rajya Sabha chairman Krishan Kant set up the new committee during the just-ended session of Parliament. It is called simply the ''''Joint Parliamentary Committee to look into the question of Jurisdictional overlap between Parliamentary Committees.'''' The 15 members - 10 from the Lok Sabha, rest from the Rajya Sabha - have been asked to hand in their report by March-end. Members include Somnath Chatterjee, Mayawati, Shivraj Patil, K Yerrannaidu, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, T N Chaturvedi and Dipankar Mukherjee. At last count, members of the lower House were associated with about 40 committees, more of less permanent in nature. Most of them had members from the Rajya Sabha as well. In addition, there are ad hoc committees, which are disbanded once their job is done. These include select committees of both Houses to scrutinise Bills before Parliament, and look into specific issues, like the joint committee on the Bofors deal. Some of the jurisdictional overlap is between the old finance-related committee and the department-related committee which were set up from 1993 onwards. The old ones include the Committee on Public Accounts, which has been examining government expenses since 1950 and has tabled over 1,000 reports. The first Railway Convention Committee, which determines the rate of dividend the Railways have to pay to the exchequer, was set up in 1949. But the committee system really came into being with the department-related standing committees drawn from both Houses. There are 17 of them now, looking into the functioning of Union ministries ranging from defence and external affairs to agriculture and rural development. The system has more admirers than detractors. The committees'' membership usually reflects the political make-up of Parliament itself. They discuss issues in a much calmer atmosphere, and in greater depth, than is possible on the floor of the House where everyone is out to score debating points. But they have to make sure they don''t get in each others way.