Parliament of India: Structure, Functions, and Decline

In a parliamentary democracy the legislature is the centre of gravity of the constitutional order: the executive is drawn from it, survives by its confidence, and spends only what it authorises. The Indian Constitution built Parliament to be exactly that. What has developed instead is a chamber that meets for a fraction of the days it once did, passes much of its legislation in minutes, and audits the executive after the money is spent. That measurable distance is the subject.

Parliament as the centre of gravity of the constitutional order

• Article 79 constitutes Parliament as the President, the Council of States and the House of the People — three components, not two chambers alone.
  • The fusion of powers, not their separation, is the organising principle: ministers are members of the legislature and remain in office only while the popular chamber sustains them.
  • Article 75(3) makes the Council of Ministers collectively responsible to the Lok Sabha, which is the single provision from which Parliament’s controlling role flows.
  • Article 75(1A), inserted by the 91st Amendment, caps the ministry at 15 per cent of the Lok Sabha’s strength — an attempt to stop the executive from absorbing the House it is meant to answer to.
• Ambedkar’s defence of the parliamentary form in the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948 rested on the frequency of accountability rather than on the strength of the executive.

“The Daily Assessment of responsibility which is not available under the American system is, it is felt, far more effective than the periodic assessment” — B. R. Ambedkar

• Parliament is regulated by three overlapping bodies of rule, and confusion between them explains many procedural disputes.
  • The Constitution supplies composition, powers, privileges and the outer limits of procedure — Articles 79 to 122.
  • Each House frames its own Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business under Article 118, amendable by the House itself.
  • Conventions — unwritten practice inherited largely from Westminster — govern much of what actually happens: the Deputy Speaker from the opposition, the Public Accounts Committee chaired by the opposition since 1967, the Speaker’s casting vote for the status quo.
• Article 122 insulates proceedings from judicial review on grounds of alleged irregularity of procedure, which is what makes internal self-discipline load-bearing rather than optional.

Why the President is part of Parliament

• The President is not merely an external assenting authority but a constituent element of the legislature, in the Westminster tradition of the Crown-in-Parliament.
  • No bill becomes law without assent under Article 111; the President may assent, withhold, or return a non-money bill once for reconsideration, and must assent if it is passed again.
  • Summoning, prorogation and dissolution under Article 85 are formally presidential acts, so the calendar of Parliament is set through the executive.
  • Article 87 requires the President to address both Houses at the first session after each general election and at the first session of each year, on which the Motion of Thanks debate follows.
  • Prior recommendation of the President is required to introduce money bills and financial bills under Articles 117 and 274, and for bills altering state boundaries under Article 3.
  • Article 123 ordinances have the same force as an Act — legislative power vested in the executive branch, exercisable only when the Houses are not in session.
• The practical consequence is that the executive controls the entry points to legislation: when Parliament meets, what money proposals may be moved, and whether law can be made while it is not meeting at all.

The Lok Sabha: composition and the representation question

• Article 81 fixes a maximum of 550 elected members — 530 from the states and 20 from the union territories — with the present strength at 543.
  • Members are chosen by direct election from territorial constituencies on universal adult suffrage under Article 326, the voting age lowered to 18 by the 61st Amendment.
  • Article 81(2) requires, so far as practicable, a uniform ratio of population to seats across states and a uniform ratio of constituency to population within a state — the equality-of-vote principle that the seat freeze has suspended.
  • The normal term is five years under Article 83(2), extendable by one year at a time during a Proclamation of Emergency, as happened to the Fifth Lok Sabha.
  • Articles 330 and 332 reserve seats for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, extended to 2030 by the 104th Amendment.

The 104th Amendment and the end of Anglo-Indian nomination

• The Constitution (104th Amendment) Act, 2019, effective from 25 January 2020, did two distinct things that are often collapsed into one.
  • It extended SC and ST reservation in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies by a further ten years.
  • It allowed the nomination of two Anglo-Indians under Article 331 to lapse, ending a provision that had run since 1950 and reducing the House’s maximum strength accordingly.
  • The justification offered was the community’s small enumerated numbers; the criticism is that a nominated route for a micro-minority with no territorial concentration was precisely the case for which nomination exists, since such a group can never win a constituency.

The frozen delimitation and the 2026 question

• Delimitation is the readjustment of seats among states and of constituency boundaries within them, and it has been frozen for half a century.
  • The 42nd Amendment (1976) froze the allocation of seats on the basis of the 1971 census until after the 2001 census, so that states succeeding at population control would not be penalised with fewer seats.
  • The 84th Amendment (2001) extended the freeze to the first census taken after 2026.
  • The 87th Amendment (2003) permitted redrawing constituency boundaries within states on 2001 census figures, while leaving each state’s total unchanged — internal readjustment without inter-state redistribution.
• The freeze has produced gross malapportionment, which is the substance of the dispute rather than a technicality.
  • Constituencies in high-growth northern states now contain far more electors than constituencies in the south, so the weight of a southern vote is systematically greater.
  • The counter-claim is one of federal fairness: states that achieved demographic transition were promised they would not lose representation for doing so.
• The 2026 attempt to unfreeze failed in the Lok Sabha, and the episode is the most instructive recent demonstration of the amendment threshold as a real constraint.
  • The Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026 proposed raising the Lok Sabha’s maximum from 550 to 850 — 815 for states and 35 for union territories — and amending Articles 81, 82, 170 and 334A to permit delimitation on the 2011 census.
  • The Delimitation Bill, 2026 would have replaced the 2002 Act and constituted a commission headed by a Supreme Court judge, with its orders final and not open to review; the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026 carried the change to Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir and Puducherry.
  • On 17 April 2026 the amendment bill secured 298 votes to 230 of 528 members present and voting — short of the two-thirds of those present and voting required by Article 368 — and was negatived. The two accompanying bills were then withdrawn.
  • Opposition objection turned on redistribution: on the announced allocation Tamil Nadu would fall from 39 seats to 32 while Uttar Pradesh rose from 80 to 89, against a government assurance that the southern states’ aggregate would rise from 129 to 195 seats and their share hold at roughly a quarter.
• Article 243O bars judicial interference with delimitation orders for local bodies, and the 2026 bill sought a comparable finality for parliamentary delimitation — which is why the composition of the commission was itself contested.

A seat freeze devised as a temporary reward for population control is now the largest unaddressed inequality in Indian representation, and Parliament cannot muster two-thirds to end it.

The Women’s Reservation Act and its delayed operation

• The Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023 — the first legislation taken up in the new Parliament building — reserves one-third of seats for women.
  • Article 330A applies it to the Lok Sabha, Article 332A to state legislative assemblies, and it extends to the Delhi assembly; reservation for SC and ST women operates within their existing quotas, not alongside them.
  • Article 334A makes the reservation take effect only after a census and the delimitation exercise that follows it, and it runs for fifteen years thereafter, with rotation of reserved seats after each delimitation.
  • The Rajya Sabha and the state legislative councils are excluded, which is a substantive omission rather than an oversight: the upper chambers remain untouched by the largest representational reform since independence.
• The delay is the criticism. A reform passed with near unanimity was written so that it could not operate on the strength of its own passage.
  • The government issued the commencement notification on 16 April 2026 alongside the delimitation package, but the operative condition in Article 334A — reservation to follow census and delimitation — survived the defeat of the 131st Amendment, which had been designed to unlink the two.
  • Implementation is therefore still projected around the 2029 general election, contingent on a census and a delimitation exercise that Parliament has not yet been able to authorise.
  • Women were about 14 per cent of the members returned in 2024, so the gap between the enacted norm and the sitting House remains very wide.

The Rajya Sabha: composition, permanence and special powers

• Article 80 caps the Council of States at 250 members — 238 representing states and union territories and 12 nominated by the President — with present strength at 245.
  • Nominated members are chosen for special knowledge or practical experience in literature, science, art and social service; unlike the Lok Sabha’s abolished nominations they remain, and are frequently criticised as patronage.
  • Representation of the states is unequal and population-weighted, unlike the American Senate’s equal representation — Uttar Pradesh returns 31 members and Sikkim one. This is the clearest indication that the Rajya Sabha was designed as a revising chamber with a federal colour, not as a chamber of equal states.
• Members are elected indirectly by the elected members of the state legislative assemblies through proportional representation by the single transferable vote.
  • The system allows a party with a defined share of assembly seats to secure a proportional number of Rajya Sabha seats, so the chamber reflects state-level party strength as it stood at the last assembly election, giving it a different political rhythm from the Lok Sabha.
  • Union territory representatives are elected by an electoral college constituted for the purpose; only Delhi, Puducherry and Jammu and Kashmir send members.
• The Rajya Sabha is a permanent body — Article 83(1) provides that it is not subject to dissolution, and one-third of its members retire every second year, each serving six years.
  • Permanence gives it institutional continuity across dissolutions of the popular chamber and a memory the Lok Sabha does not have.
  • It also means a government with a fresh Lok Sabha majority may face an upper house elected under a previous political dispensation, which is the chamber’s principal capacity to delay.
• The Vice-President is ex officio Chairman under Article 64 and is not a member of the House, which distinguishes the office from the Speaker’s.

Domicile, open ballot and Kuldip Nayar

• The Representation of the People (Amendment) Act, 2003 made two changes that together altered the chamber’s character.
  • It removed the requirement that a candidate be ordinarily resident in the state from which he seeks election, so that any elector anywhere in India may contest from any state.
  • It replaced the secret ballot with an open ballot, requiring an elector to show the marked ballot to the authorised agent of his party.
• Kuldip Nayar v. Union of India (2006) upheld both, and the reasoning matters more than the outcome.
  • On residence, the Court held that domicile is not a basic feature of federalism and that residence had never been a constitutional requirement, only a statutory one — Parliament could therefore drop it.
  • On the open ballot, it held that secrecy of the ballot is not absolute in a constitutional sense in an indirect election by public representatives, and that transparency was a legitimate means of curbing cross-voting and the corruption that accompanied it.
  • The criticism is that the two changes together hollow out the federal rationale: a chamber meant to represent states is now filled by candidates with no connection to them, voting under party surveillance, which converts state representation into party representation.

Special powers of the Rajya Sabha

• Article 249 allows the Rajya Sabha, by a resolution supported by two-thirds of members present and voting, to declare that it is in the national interest for Parliament to legislate on a State List entry.
  • The resolution is valid for one year, is renewable, and the law it authorises ceases six months after it expires.
  • This is a power the Lok Sabha cannot exercise at all, and its logic is federal: the encroachment on state powers must be sanctioned by the chamber representing the states.
• Article 312 allows the same chamber, by the same majority, to authorise the creation of a new All India Service — the only route by which cadres serving both Union and states can be established.
• The Rajya Sabha’s inability to bring down a government is often read as weakness; it is better read as the structural counterpart of its permanence — a chamber that cannot be dissolved cannot be allowed to unseat a ministry.

Equal and unequal powers of the two Houses

Matter	Position of the two Houses
Ordinary bills	Equal — may originate in either House; both must pass it; deadlock resolved by joint sitting
Constitutional amendment bills	Equal, and no joint sitting — each House must pass it separately by the special majority under Article 368
Money bills	Unequal — originate only in the Lok Sabha; Rajya Sabha may only recommend within 14 days, and its recommendations may be rejected
Financial bills of Category I	Originate only in Lok Sabha on presidential recommendation, but are otherwise treated as ordinary bills — joint sitting available
Budget and demands for grants	Unequal — the Rajya Sabha discusses the budget but cannot vote on demands for grants
Confidence in the government	Unequal — only the Lok Sabha can carry a no-confidence motion under Rule 198
Legislating on the State List, All India Services	Rajya Sabha alone, under Articles 249 and 312
Removal of the Vice-President	Resolution must originate in the Rajya Sabha, then be agreed to by the Lok Sabha
Impeachment, removal of judges, emergency proclamations	Equal
Election of President and Vice-President	Equal participation; nominated members vote in the Vice-Presidential election but not the Presidential

Joint sittings under Article 108

• Article 108 provides for a joint sitting of both Houses where a bill passed by one House is rejected by the other, or the Houses disagree on amendments, or more than six months elapse without the second House passing it.
  • The joint sitting is summoned by the President and presided over by the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, not the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha.
  • The bill is decided by a simple majority of the total members present and voting of both Houses together, which effectively guarantees the numerically larger Lok Sabha’s will prevails.
  • Money bills and constitutional amendment bills are excluded — the first because the Rajya Sabha has no power to block, the second because concurrence of both Houses is a substantive requirement.
• The device has been used only three times in the Republic’s history, which is itself evidence of how rarely the second chamber blocks outright.
  • Dowry Prohibition Bill, 1960, resolved by joint sitting in 1961.
  • Banking Service Commission (Repeal) Bill, 1977, resolved in 1978.
  • Prevention of Terrorism Bill, 2002 — the only joint sitting since, and the only one on a security law.
• The threat of a joint sitting shapes behaviour more than its use: a determined Lok Sabha majority can always prevail on ordinary legislation, so the Rajya Sabha’s real leverage lies in delay, publicity and committee referral rather than veto.

The functions Parliament was designed to perform

Parliament’s work is usually described as legislation, but legislation is the smallest part of what a modern legislature does and the part it does least independently. Bagehot listed the Commons’ functions as elective, expressive, teaching, informing and legislative — putting law-making last of five. John Stuart Mill went further, arguing that a numerous assembly is radically unfit for the actual drafting of law, and that its proper office is to watch and control the government and to compel a full exposition of its acts.

• Legislative function. Parliament makes law for the Union List and the Concurrent List, and for the State List under Articles 249, 250, 252 and 253.
  • Residuary powers under Article 248 and Entry 97 of the Union List belong to Parliament.
  • Article 253 lets Parliament legislate on any matter to implement an international treaty, which has become a substantial channel of central legislative expansion.
• Financial function. No tax may be levied and no expenditure incurred from the Consolidated Fund without parliamentary authorisation — Articles 265 and 266.
• Executive accountability. Questions, motions, debates and committees are the instruments by which ministers are made to explain and defend.
• Constituent function. Parliament alone initiates constitutional amendment under Article 368; state legislatures may only ratify, never propose.
• Electoral function. Elected members participate in the election of the President, and both Houses in the election of the Vice-President; the Lok Sabha elects its Speaker and Deputy Speaker, the Rajya Sabha its Deputy Chairman.
• Judicial function. Impeachment of the President under Article 61, removal of judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts under Articles 124(4) and 217, removal of the CAG and the Chief Election Commissioner, and punishment for breach of privilege or contempt.
• Representative function. The House is the institutional site where India’s social and regional plurality is present in one room — the aspect Christophe Jaffrelot analysed as a silent revolution in the composition of political elites.
• Deliberative function. Debate on policy, foreign affairs and social questions, whose value lies in forcing the government to state reasons in public.
• Ventilation of grievances. Zero hour, calling attention, and the private member’s route allow individual and local grievances to be placed on the national record.
• Legitimation. As Morris-Jones argued of the early Indian Parliament, its importance lay less in what it enacted than in its capacity to confer legitimacy on government action and to educate a new electorate in constitutional politics.

The legislative process

Types of bill

Type	Constitutional basis	Distinguishing features
Ordinary bill	Articles 107–108	Either House; simple majority; joint sitting available; President may return once
Money bill	Article 110	Lok Sabha only, on presidential recommendation; Speaker certifies; Rajya Sabha has 14 days to recommend; no joint sitting; President cannot return
Financial bill, Category I	Article 117(1)	Contains money-bill matters plus other matters; Lok Sabha only, presidential recommendation; otherwise an ordinary bill
Financial bill, Category II	Article 117(3)	Involves expenditure from the Consolidated Fund but no Article 110 matter; either House; recommendation needed only at the consideration stage
Constitutional amendment bill	Article 368	Either House; special majority in each House separately; some categories need ratification by half the states; no joint sitting; assent mandatory since the 24th Amendment

• Stages of an ordinary bill are formally elaborate and, in current practice, frequently compressed into a single sitting.
  • First reading — introduction, usually without debate; the bill is published in the Gazette.
  • Referral stage — the House may refer the bill to a department-related standing committee, a select committee of one House, or a joint committee of both. Nothing compels referral, and that omission is now the central weakness of the process.
  • Second reading — general discussion, clause-by-clause consideration, and voting on amendments. This is where scrutiny is supposed to occur.
  • Third reading — debate confined to acceptance or rejection of the bill as settled.
  • Transmission to the other House, then assent under Article 111.
• A bill pending in the Rajya Sabha does not lapse, while one pending in or passed by the Lok Sabha alone does on dissolution, because that House is permanent; a bill pending in or passed by the Lok Sabha alone lapses. This asymmetry is a direct consequence of Article 83(1).

Delegated legislation and its scrutiny

• Delegated legislation — rules, regulations, notifications and orders framed by the executive under authority conferred by a statute — is now the bulk of the law that citizens actually encounter.
  • The justification is practical: technical complexity, the need for speed, and the impossibility of anticipating every contingency in the parent Act.
  • The constitutional limit was set in the Delhi Laws Act reference (1951): Parliament may delegate, but cannot delegate its essential legislative function — the laying down of policy and the enactment of that policy into a binding rule.
• The scrutiny machinery exists but is weak relative to the volume.
  • The Committee on Subordinate Legislation in each House examines whether rules stay within the powers conferred by the parent statute.
  • Most statutes contain a laying provision requiring rules to be placed before both Houses, with power to modify or annul; in practice rules are laid and rarely examined.
  • Skeletal legislation — an Act that states an object and leaves the substance to rules — has become common, and it transfers the real policy decision from the House to the ministry while preserving the appearance of legislative authorship.
• Rojer Mathew (2019) struck down the tribunal rules framed under the Finance Act, 2017 for excessive delegation, holding that Parliament had given the executive a free hand over appointment, tenure and service conditions of tribunal members — the clearest recent judicial statement that delegation has a constitutional ceiling.

The money bill question

• Article 110 defines a money bill exhaustively and narrowly — a bill containing only provisions dealing with the imposition or regulation of a tax, the borrowing of money by the Union, custody of the Consolidated or Contingency Fund, appropriation, declaring expenditure charged on the Consolidated Fund, receipt or audit of money, or a matter incidental to these.
  • Article 110(3) makes the Speaker’s decision final on whether a bill is a money bill, and the certificate is endorsed on the bill when it is transmitted and when it is presented for assent.
  • The consequence of certification is that the Rajya Sabha is reduced to a recommending body and the President cannot withhold assent — bicameralism is switched off for that bill.
• The controversy is not academic, because certification has been used to carry measures whose substance goes well beyond taxation and expenditure.
  • The Aadhaar Act, 2016 was passed as a money bill; the Finance Act, 2017 restructured seventeen tribunals; amendments to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act travelled the same route.
• Puttaswamy (Aadhaar) (2018) upheld the certification by four to one.
  • The majority reasoned that the Act’s core was the delivery of subsidies and benefits from the Consolidated Fund under Section 7, and that the remaining provisions were incidental to that.
  • Justice Chandrachud dissented, holding that the Act’s dominant purpose was the creation of an identity architecture, that Article 110 must be read strictly because it disables a constitutional chamber, and that passing it as a money bill was a fraud on the Constitution. He also held that the Speaker’s certificate is not immune from judicial review, since Article 122 protects irregularity of procedure and not illegality.
• Rojer Mathew v. South Indian Bank (2019), a Constitution Bench, doubted the majority’s reasoning in Puttaswamy and referred the question of the scope of Article 110 to a larger bench, where it remains undecided.
  • The Aadhaar review petitions were dismissed by four to one in 2021 even though the reference on the very ground of challenge was pending — a sequence that drew sustained academic criticism.
  • The reference has been listed and deferred repeatedly since; as of 2026 the larger bench has not delivered.
• The live instance is fresh. The Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2026, raising the sanctioned strength of the Court from 33 judges to 37, was itself certified as a money bill — the government arguing that judges’ salaries are charged on the Consolidated Fund under Articles 112(3)(d)(i) and 146(3), and critics answering that a bill whose subject is the composition of a constitutional court under Article 124(1) merely involves expenditure and does not deal with it.

If the Speaker’s certificate is effectively unreviewable, a bicameral Parliament becomes unicameral at the discretion of a presiding officer elected by the majority party.

Financial control of the executive

• The purse is the oldest legislative power and the one most completely lost in practice. The Constitution’s design is careful; the working of it is a formality for most of the money.
• Article 112 requires an annual financial statement — the budget — to be laid before both Houses, distinguishing charged expenditure from votable expenditure.
  • Charged expenditure — the emoluments of the President, the salaries of the Speaker, Chairman, judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts, the CAG, debt charges, and sums required to satisfy court decrees — is discussed but not voted, precisely to insulate these offices from majority pressure.
  • Debt charges being non-votable is the point at which parliamentary control over past borrowing is surrendered by design.
• Article 113 provides for demands for grants, which only the Lok Sabha votes, and which it may assent to, refuse, or reduce.
• Cut motions are the instrument of refusal and reduction, and each carries a different political meaning.
  • Policy cut — that the demand be reduced to one rupee, signifying disapproval of the policy underlying the demand.
  • Economy cut — reduction by a specified amount, signifying that economies are possible.
  • Token cut — reduction by one hundred rupees, moved to ventilate a specific grievance within the government’s responsibility.
  • Cut motions are moved regularly and almost never carried; a government that lost one would ordinarily be treated as having lost the confidence of the House.
• The guillotine is the decisive device: on the last allotted day the Speaker puts all outstanding demands to the vote together, whether or not they have been discussed.
  • Only a handful of ministries’ demands are debated in detail each year; around four-fifths of the budget was voted without discussion across the 17th Lok Sabha.
• Article 114 requires an Appropriation Bill to authorise withdrawal from the Consolidated Fund; no amendment may be moved to it that varies the amount or destination of a grant already voted.
• The Finance Bill gives effect to the taxation proposals and must be passed within seventy-five days; it is a money bill, which is why substantive non-tax provisions inserted into it are so consequential.
• Article 116 provides for a vote on account — an advance grant to carry the government until the full budget is passed — and for exceptional grants and votes of credit for indefinite services.
• Three funds carry different constitutional consequences.

Fund	Provision	Character
Consolidated Fund of India	Article 266(1)	All revenues, loans raised and recoveries; no withdrawal without parliamentary appropriation
Public Account of India	Article 266(2)	Money held by government as banker or trustee — provident funds, small savings; executive withdrawal without appropriation
Contingency Fund of India	Article 267	Imprest at the disposal of the President for unforeseen expenditure; subsequently regularised by Parliament

• The Comptroller and Auditor General under Article 148 audits the accounts and submits reports under Article 151, which are examined by the Public Accounts Committee.
  • The audit is post hoc: the CAG reports on money already spent, and the PAC examines a report on transactions often two or more years old.
  • The committee’s finding, however severe, is a recommendation; the accounting officer’s answer is a written government reply, and there is no mechanism of recovery or sanction.
• Public borrowing is the largest unfilled space in the design.Article 292 empowers the Union to borrow on the security of the Consolidated Fund within such limits as Parliament may by law fix — and Parliament has never enacted such a law.
  • The Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, 2003 supplies a statutory discipline of targets and disclosures, but it is executive-administered and its escape clauses have been invoked repeatedly.
  • The constitutional point remains: borrowing is a charge on future generations, and India’s Parliament imposes no ceiling on it, unlike legislatures that vote a debt limit.

Devices of executive accountability and their record

Device	Purpose and rule	Working record
Question hour	First hour of a sitting; starred questions get oral answers and supplementaries, unstarred written answers, short notice questions on urgent matters	Frequently the first casualty of disruption; in the 2026 monsoon session the Lok Sabha’s question hour functioned for nine minutes, with two of 380 listed oral questions answered
Zero hour	An Indian innovation, unmentioned in the rules; matters of urgent public importance raised without notice after question hour	Widely used for grievance ventilation; no obligation on the minister to reply
Half-an-hour discussion	On a matter of sufficient public importance already answered in a question, where the answer needs elucidation	Sparsely used
Short-duration discussion	Two-hour discussion on a matter of urgent public importance; no formal motion, no vote	The main vehicle for debating policy without testing confidence
Calling attention	Member calls a minister’s attention to a matter of urgent public importance; the minister must make a statement	Effective for eliciting a statement on record; also an Indian device
Adjournment motion	Sets aside the day’s business to discuss a definite matter of urgent public importance; carries an element of censure	Rarely admitted; the Rajya Sabha does not have it at all
No-confidence motion	Lok Sabha only, Rule 198; needs fifty members to move; if carried the government must resign	Moved about thirty times since 1952; governments have fallen on it, but under a secure single-party majority it functions as a staged debate rather than a test
Censure motion	States specific charges against the ministry or a minister; needs no fifty-member support and does not require resignation if carried	Very rarely admitted
Motion of thanks	Debate on the President’s Address; defeat amounts to defeat of the government	Has never been defeated in the Lok Sabha; amendments to it are routinely negatived
Privilege motion	Against a member or outsider for breach of privilege or contempt	Uncodified privileges make the boundary uncertain; used against journalists and officials, which is itself the argument for codification

• The instruments are intact and the practice has hollowed. Every device listed above exists exactly as designed; what has changed is the number of days on which they can be used, the willingness of the chair to admit them, and the incentive structure that rewards disruption over interrogation.

The decline of Parliament: the indicators

Decline of Parliament means the failure of a legislature to perform the functions constitutionally assigned to it, accompanied by a fall in public confidence and a corresponding rise of the executive and the judiciary in the institutional balance. Lord Bryce identified the phenomenon in the democracies of the interwar period, and the pattern he described — legislative initiative migrating to the cabinet, scrutiny migrating to committees and courts — has been reproduced in India with local variations.

Sitting days

• The first Lok Sabha averaged about 135 sitting days a year; the 17th Lok Sabha averaged about 55.
  • The 17th Lok Sabha (2019–24) held 274 sittings across 15 sessions — the fewest of any full-term Lok Sabha; 40 scheduled sittings, about 13 per cent, were never held, and 11 of 15 sessions were adjourned sine die ahead of schedule.
  • The 18th Lok Sabha has not reversed the trend: the 2026 monsoon session ran 19 sitting days from 20 July to 13 August.
  • No provision fixes a minimum number of sitting days; Article 85 requires only that six months not elapse between sessions, a floor consistent with meeting for a few weeks a year.

Legislation without scrutiny

• Committee referral has collapsed from the practice of the previous decade.
  • Roughly 60 per cent of bills were referred to standing committees in the 14th and 15th Lok Sabhas; the 17th Lok Sabha referred 16 per cent of the 179 bills it passed.
  • In the 18th Lok Sabha the figures are lower still — three bills referred in 2024, seven in 2025, two in 2026, with no bill newly referred in the 2026 monsoon session against five in the corresponding session a year earlier.
• Debate time per bill has contracted sharply.
  • The median time spent on a bill fell from five hours fifty-six minutes in 2024 to three hours fifty-two minutes in 2025 to two hours twenty minutes in 2026.
  • Of 46 bills passed in the 18th Lok Sabha to August 2026, 29 — some 63 per cent — cleared at least one House in under an hour.
  • In the 2026 monsoon session seven of eleven bills were passed in five minutes or less, nine cleared without any member speaking apart from the minister, and the MSME Development (Amendment) Bill took three minutes.
• Bills are increasingly introduced and passed in the same session — 53 per cent in the 18th Lok Sabha and 62 per cent in the 17th, against 33 per cent in the 16th — which forecloses consultation, amendment and expert evidence.
  • The 17th Lok Sabha passed 58 per cent of bills within two weeks of introduction; the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill, 2019 and the Women’s Reservation Bill, 2023 each passed within two days.
  • About 35 per cent of bills in the Lok Sabha and 34 per cent in the Rajya Sabha were passed with less than an hour of discussion in the 17th Lok Sabha.
  • Recorded voting was used on only about 9 per cent of bills; the rest were carried on voice votes, which leaves no record of how any member voted.

Ordinances

• Article 123 was designed for genuine urgency when the Houses are not in session, subject to laying before Parliament within six weeks of reassembly.
  • The route has been used several hundred times since 1950, and its frequency correlates directly with the shrinking of the sitting calendar — the less Parliament meets, the more law is made without it.
  • The Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Ordinance, 2026 is a current illustration: a change to the composition of the apex court made first by ordinance and then carried by a bill certified as a money bill.
• Judicial control has hardened without eliminating the practice.
  • D.C. Wadhwa v. State of Bihar (1987) condemned Bihar’s re-promulgation of 256 ordinances, some kept alive by successive re-promulgation for as long as fourteen years, as a subversion of the legislative process.
  • Krishna Kumar Singh v. State of Bihar (2017), a seven-judge bench, held that re-promulgation is a fraud on the Constitution, that the laying requirement is mandatory, and that an ordinance does not create enduring rights once it lapses.
  • R.C. Cooper established that the President’s satisfaction under Article 123 is justiciable on the ground of mala fides, so the power is not wholly beyond review.

Private members’ business

• The private member’s bill has effectively ceased to be a legislative route.
  • 729 private members’ bills were introduced in the 17th Lok Sabha and two were discussed.
  • Only fourteen private members’ bills have ever been enacted, and none since 1970.
  • The 2026 monsoon session transacted no private members’ business at all, the second consecutive session in which the Friday slot was lost entirely.
• The consequence is that the legislative agenda belongs wholly to the government: what is not in the ministry’s list is not law, and a backbencher’s initiative has no realistic path.

The Deputy Speaker vacancy

• Article 93 requires the Lok Sabha to choose a Speaker and a Deputy Speaker “as soon as may be”, and the office has now been vacant since 19 June 2019.
  • The 17th Lok Sabha was the first in the Republic’s history to complete a full term without one; the 18th Lok Sabha has continued the vacancy, so the post has stood empty for over six and a half years.
  • The convention that the Deputy Speaker comes from the opposition — observed for most of the post-1990 period — is what has actually been discarded; the vacancy is the mechanism, not the object.
  • Petitions seeking a direction to hold the election have been filed, but the phrase “as soon as may be” supplies no enforceable deadline, which is a drafting gap that convention alone was expected to fill.

Disruption, lost hours and suspensions

• Productivity has become volatile and, in the worst sessions, negligible.
  • In the 2026 monsoon session the Lok Sabha functioned for 15 per cent of its scheduled time and the Rajya Sabha for 33 per cent, with the chair adjourning the Houses 35 and 37 times respectively — the lowest Lok Sabha figure in a decade.
  • The immediately preceding 2026 budget session ran at 93 per cent in the Lok Sabha and above 100 per cent in the Rajya Sabha, which shows that the collapse is political rather than structural: the House works when the parties decide it will.
• Mass suspension has become a standard response to disruption, which converts a disciplinary tool into a means of clearing the chamber.
  • The 17th Lok Sabha saw 206 suspensions across both Houses.
  • In the winter session of 2023 close to 150 opposition members were suspended — the largest mass suspension in Indian parliamentary history — and substantial legislation, including replacements for the colonial criminal codes, was passed in a House emptied of most of the opposition.
• Grievance has migrated outside the chamber, which is the decline indicator that does not appear in any parliamentary statistic.
  • The farmers’ agitation of 2020–21 against the three farm laws was settled by repeal in November 2021 after a year of protest at the borders of Delhi — the laws had themselves been enacted after ordinances and passed amid a contested voice vote in the Rajya Sabha.
  • When civil society mobilisation, litigation and street protest become the effective route to reversing legislation, the deliberative function has been relocated from the House to the pavement and the courtroom.
• The incentive structure rewards the disruption. A member who shouts in the well is on the evening broadcast; a member who asks a precise supplementary in a thin House is not, and the televising of proceedings has strengthened the performative use of the chamber at the expense of its interrogative use.

Criminalisation of politics

• Nearly half the members of the 18th Lok Sabha have declared criminal cases, and the trend is unbroken across five general elections.

Lok Sabha	MPs with declared criminal cases	Share	With serious cases
2004	125	23%	—
2009	162	30%	76 (14%)
2014	185	34%	112 (21%)
2019	233	43%	159 (29%)
2024	251	46%	170 (31%)

• Twenty-seven members of the current House are declared convicts, and the serious-case category includes charges of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping and crimes against women.
• The judiciary has moved where Parliament has not.
  • Lily Thomas v. Union of India (2013) struck down Section 8(4) of the Representation of the People Act, ending the protection that let a convicted legislator retain his seat while appealing.
  • Public Interest Foundation v. Union of India (2018), a Constitution Bench, declined to disqualify candidates at the stage of framing of charges — holding that to do so would add a disqualification the statute does not contain — and instead directed full disclosure of antecedents, leaving the substantive reform expressly to Parliament.
  • Rambabu Singh Thakur v. Sunil Arora (2020) required political parties to publish the criminal antecedents of their candidates with reasons for selecting them, and to explain why a candidate without cases was not chosen. Parliament has legislated on none of this.
• Sita Soren v. Union of India (2024), a seven-judge bench, overruled P.V. Narasimha Rao (1998) and held that a legislator who takes a bribe to vote or speak enjoys no immunity under Articles 105(2) and 194(2) — closing an immunity that had stood for a quarter of a century and that had made the bribery of legislators effectively unprosecutable.

Parliament and political corruption: the record of the inquiry device

• Parliament’s principal instrument against large-scale corruption has been the Joint Parliamentary Committee, and its record is mixed in a specific and diagnosable way.
  • JPCs were constituted on the Bofors payments (1987), on the securities and banking transactions scam (1992), on the stock market scam (2001), on the soft drinks pesticide question (2003) and on 2G spectrum allocation (2011).
  • The 1992 securities JPC produced the most substantial output — a detailed account of how banking funds were diverted into equities — and its recommendations fed the strengthening of securities regulation.
• The structural limits are consistent across every one of them.
  • A JPC’s composition mirrors the House, so the government’s own majority sits on the committee investigating the government.
  • Its findings are recommendatory; it cannot prosecute, and it depends on the executive for documents and witnesses.
  • Dissent notes have repeatedly split the reports along party lines, which destroys the evidentiary authority the device depends on.
  • The CAG’s audit reports, not the House’s own inquiries, have been the actual trigger of the largest recent scandals — which locates the effective accountability function in an external constitutional auditor rather than in Parliament’s own procedures.

The World Bank’s six indicators

• A legislature’s performance can be assessed against six criteria, and the Indian Parliament’s position on each is now measurable.
  • Financial accountability — whether the legislature secures accountability for public money at proportionate cost. The guillotine, post-audit and the absence of any borrowing limit place India poorly.
  • Compliance — whether members observe the rules of procedure they themselves make. Disruption, suspension and the routine loss of question hour indicate weak compliance.
  • Efficiency — quality of output against time and cost invested. Median debate per bill of a little over two hours points to high throughput and low deliberation.
  • Effectiveness — how far the institution’s presence is felt in national life. Parliament remains the definitive forum at moments of crisis, but its routine presence has thinned.
  • Relevance — the qualitative improvement the institution brings to citizens’ lives. Legislation continues to be substantial in volume and consequence, whatever the process.
  • Sustainability — whether the institution is rising or declining. On every quantitative indicator except social representativeness, the direction is downward.
• Devesh Kapur and Pratap Bhanu Mehta capture the paradox precisely: Parliament has become markedly more representative in social terms while becoming less effective as an institution of accountability — inclusion and capacity have moved in opposite directions.

Parliament has not been abolished; it has been bypassed — by ordinance, by money bill, by the guillotine, and by the simple expedient of not sitting.

Why the decline occurred

• Executive dominance is the primary cause, and it is structural rather than personal.
  • The cabinet controls the legislative agenda, the calendar and the whip, so a government with a majority faces no arithmetic in which it can be defeated.
  • The Prime Minister’s Office has grown into a coordinating and originating centre of policy, which further reduces even the cabinet’s own deliberative role.
• The anti-defection law removed the individual legislator’s independence, which was historically the internal check on cabinet power.
  • Under the Tenth Schedule, voting against the party whip attracts disqualification, so a member cannot dissent on a bill without risking his seat.
  • The result is that the unit of parliamentary politics is the party, not the member, and debate cannot change an outcome that the party’s numbers have already determined.
  • The Law Commission has proposed restricting the whip’s reach to confidence and no-confidence motions, money bills and motions of thanks, which would restore free voting on ordinary legislation without endangering governments.
• Party centralisation means candidature, office and advancement depend on the leadership, so the incentive to build an independent parliamentary reputation has disappeared.
• Judicial expansion has absorbed functions the legislature vacated — public interest litigation, continuing mandamus, guidelines in the absence of statute — which Pratap Bhanu Mehta has characterised as a drift toward judicial sovereignty.
• Professionalisation without training: politics is now a full-time occupation entered without any induction into procedure, drafting, budget analysis or committee method, so members arrive unequipped to use the instruments available to them.
• Globalisation and treaty-based rule-making narrow the range of autonomous national policy — trade, standards, intellectual property and financial regulation are shaped in fora where legislatures ratify rather than deliberate.
• The phase of the party system matters more than is usually acknowledged.
  • Single-party dominance to 1989 and again after 2014 has produced executives that need not negotiate.
  • The coalition decades of 1989 to 2014 produced the opposite: more committee referrals, more amendments accepted, more legislation delayed and redrafted — evidence that parliamentary vitality tracks parliamentary arithmetic.
• Destructive opposition compounds the problem from the other side.
  • In an era where the major parties differ less over developmental policy than over its authorship, opposition tends toward obstruction as a substitute for alternative policy.
  • Britain’s Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and India’s statutory recognition of the Leader of the Opposition both presuppose an opposition that governs in waiting; disruption converts it into an opposition that only interrupts.
  • The 18th Lok Sabha restored a recognised Leader of the Opposition after a decade in which no party met the threshold, which is a structural improvement whose effect on conduct is not yet visible in the productivity figures.
• Media incentives reward the visible confrontation over the technical intervention, and live telecast has strengthened the performance dimension of the chamber at the cost of its working dimension.

The comparative frame

Dimension	Britain	United States	India
Relation to executive	Fused — ministers sit in and answer to the Commons	Separated — no member of Congress may hold executive office	Fused, with ministers necessarily members within six months
Second chamber	House of Lords — delay only, under the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949	Senate — co-equal, with confirmation and treaty powers of its own	Rajya Sabha — equal on ordinary bills, subordinate on money bills and confidence
Scrutiny machinery	Departmental select committees since 1979; PMQs; 20 opposition days a year	Standing committees with subpoena power; CBO, CRS, GAO	24 department-related standing committees since 1993, chronically under-used
Budgetary capacity	Executive-dominated; the Commons cannot increase expenditure	Congress writes the budget; the President proposes only	Guillotine; demands voted largely without discussion; no borrowing ceiling
Party discipline	Strong whip, but rebellion carries no disqualification	Weak — members vote across party lines routinely	Absolute — the Tenth Schedule makes dissent a disqualifying act
Legislative initiative	Overwhelmingly governmental	Substantial congressional initiative	Entirely governmental in practice

“Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work.” — Woodrow Wilson

• Executives have overpowered legislatures nearly everywhere, and the causes are common rather than Indian.
  • The scale and technicality of the modern state — welfare, macroeconomic management, regulation of complex industries — exceeds what a periodic assembly of generalists can draft or supervise.
  • Delegated legislation transfers the substance of rule-making to departments in every system that has adopted the administrative state.
  • Disciplined mass parties convert legislative majorities into instruments of the executive that commands them.
  • Emergency and security powers — war, terrorism, financial crisis, pandemic — invariably expand executive discretion, and the expansion outlives the emergency.
  • Media-centred, leader-centred electoral competition personalises mandates, so voters believe they have elected a chief executive even in parliamentary systems.
  • International commitments and supranational rule-making shift decisions to fora where legislatures merely ratify.
  • Fixed calendars and shrinking sessions limit the physical opportunity for scrutiny even where the will exists.
• The counter-instances are instructive: the US Congress retained budgetary independence by building its own analytical capacity in 1974 rather than relying on the executive’s figures, and the Commons recovered scrutiny capacity in 1979 by creating select committees shadowing every department with the power to summon ministers and civil servants.

Parliamentary supremacy and parliamentary sovereignty

The two terms are used interchangeably in ordinary speech and mean quite different things. Sovereignty is the possession of unlimited, unreviewable legal authority — no legal limit on what may be enacted, and no body competent to invalidate an enactment. Supremacy is pre-eminence within a system that itself sets the limits. The Indian Parliament is supreme among the ordinary institutions of the Union and is not sovereign, because a written Constitution, a federal division and a reviewing judiciary all stand above it.

Feature	British Parliament	Indian Parliament
Constitution	Unwritten and flexible — no legal distinction between constitutional and ordinary law	Written and rigid — amendment requires the procedures of Article 368
Judicial review	Absent in the classical doctrine; courts may declare incompatibility, not invalidity	Article 13 makes laws inconsistent with Fundamental Rights void; review is a basic feature
Distribution of powers	Unitary — Parliament may legislate on anything	Federal — the Seventh Schedule confines Parliament to its Lists, subject to Articles 249–253
Limits on amendment	None — Parliament may repeal any statute	Basic structure limit from Kesavananda Bharati (1973)
Rights	Statutory, repealable	Part III entrenched, enforceable under Article 32
Source of authority	Parliament itself	The Constitution, framed by a distinct constituent body

• Kesavananda Bharati (1973), decided seven to six by a bench of thirteen, held that Parliament may amend any part of the Constitution but may not damage or destroy its basic structure.
  • The philosophical basis is the distinction between amending and rewriting: an amending power that includes the power to abolish the Constitution is not an amending power at all.
  • The Court’s formulation is that Parliament represents political sovereignty while the Constituent Assembly represented popular sovereignty — a majority in the House is not the constituent power, however large.

“The Constitution is a precious heritage; therefore you cannot destroy its identity.” — Supreme Court of India, Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala

• The doctrine has been applied against Parliament repeatedly, which is what makes the limit real rather than theoretical.
  • Indira Nehru Gandhi v. Raj Narain (1975) struck down the clause of the 39th Amendment placing the Prime Minister’s election beyond judicial scrutiny.
  • Minerva Mills (1980) struck down the 42nd Amendment’s grant of unlimited amending power and its bar on review, holding the limited nature of the amending power itself to be a basic feature.
  • S.R. Bommai (1994) made Article 356 proclamations justiciable and named secularism and federalism as basic features.
  • I.R. Coelho (2007) confirmed that Ninth Schedule entries added after 24 April 1973 are open to basic-structure review.
  • The NJAC judgment (2015) struck down the 99th Amendment, which had been passed unanimously by both Houses and ratified by the states — the sharpest illustration that unanimity in Parliament does not confer constituent authority.
• The counter-majoritarian objection is serious and should be stated plainly: Article 368 imposes procedural conditions only, the framers considered and declined to write an unamendable core, and the content of the basic structure is decided case by case by judges who are not electorally accountable.
  • The practical answer is comparative rather than abstract. Without the doctrine, the 39th Amendment’s ouster of the Prime Minister’s election from review and the 42nd Amendment’s unlimited amending power would both have survived, and the Emergency’s constitutional entrenchment would have been complete.
• Even within its own domain Parliament is constrained by more than the courts — by the federal division, by the Fundamental Rights, by the Election Commission’s control of elections, and by international obligations.

The Indian Parliament is supreme within the Constitution and subordinate to it; supremacy without sovereignty is the precise formula, and it is a design choice, not a defect.

Should India shift to a presidential system?

• The case for the change rests on the observed pathologies rather than on theory.
  • A fixed-term executive would end the instability of coalitions and the constant management of parliamentary arithmetic.
  • Separation of the executive from the legislature would free legislators from the whip and restore genuine scrutiny, since the government’s survival would not turn on every vote.
  • Ministers chosen for competence rather than for parliamentary seats would widen the talent available to government.
  • A directly elected chief executive would give a national mandate its clearest expression, which is arguably what Indian electoral behaviour already produces informally.
• The case against is stronger, and rests on three lines.
  • Ambedkar’s argument: the parliamentary system delivers daily assessment of responsibility where the presidential delivers only periodic assessment at fixed elections — and stability without responsibility is not a gain.
  • The comparative record: outside the United States, presidentialism has an unimpressive democratic record. Fixed terms make the removal of an unpopular executive impossible short of impeachment, and a president facing a hostile legislature has no constitutional route out of deadlock except appeal to the streets or to the army.
  • Plural representation: a cabinet drawn from a legislature reflects the regional, linguistic and social diversity of the country in a way that a single elected office cannot. In a society of India’s heterogeneity, an office that only one person can hold concentrates identity as well as power.
• The constitutional obstacle is decisive: the parliamentary form is embedded in the basic structure through the democratic and republican character of the polity, so shifting to a presidential executive would require rewriting the Constitution rather than amending it.
  • The National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution examined the question and declined to recommend a change of system, proposing reform within the parliamentary framework instead.
• Deepening democracy downward is the more promising direction. Serious devolution to the institutions created by the 73rd and 74th Amendments, and elements of direct participation — gram sabhas with real fiscal authority, public consultation on draft bills, pre-legislative scrutiny — would strengthen representation without touching the form of the national executive.
• The strongest objection to the whole debate is that it misdiagnoses the disease. None of the indicators of decline — falling sitting days, absent committee referral, mass suspensions, criminal antecedents, an unfilled Deputy Speakership — is caused by the parliamentary form, and none would be cured by a presidential one.

“However good a Constitution may be, if those who are implementing it are not good, it will prove to be bad.” — B. R. Ambedkar

• Ambedkar’s answer to institutional pessimism was constitutional morality — a paramount reverence for the forms of the Constitution, settlement of disputes by argument rather than force, freedom of criticism combined with obedience to lawful authority, and self-restraint by those holding power. He warned it was not a natural sentiment in India and would have to be cultivated. The conduct that a text can require but cannot itself produce is precisely what the decline indicators measure.

The reform agenda

Restoring the House’s own capacity

• A guaranteed minimum number of sitting days, either by constitutional amendment or by a binding resolution of each House.
  • The National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution recommended a minimum of 120 sittings a year for the Lok Sabha and 100 for the Rajya Sabha.
  • Private members’ bills to the same effect have been introduced without being taken up, and some state assemblies have adopted minimum-sitting resolutions.
  • A complementary reform is to place the summoning power in the hands of the House — a fixed annual calendar published in advance, and a right of a specified minority of members to requisition a sitting.
• Mandatory committee reference for every bill except those certified urgent, with the certificate itself subject to a vote.
  • The department-related standing committees sit in camera, operate without the whip, can summon officials and take expert evidence, and draw from both Houses, which makes them the one site where cross-chamber legislative work actually happens.
  • Their limits are equally clear — recommendations are not binding, attendance is poor, and annual rotation of membership prevents the accumulation of subject expertise. Longer tenures and published government responses within a fixed period would address both.
• A parliamentary budget office — an independent costing and analysis unit reporting to Parliament rather than to the finance ministry.
  • Members currently confront the budget with no independent estimate of the cost or revenue effect of any proposal, which is the practical reason the guillotine is uncontested.
• An independent parliamentary information and research service. Information is the raw material of surveillance; a legislature dependent on the ministries it audits for its facts cannot audit them. Subhash Kashyap’s proposal for Parliament to build its own national information reservoir, with a network of feeding and retrieval points rather than reliance on published and outdated official documents, remains unimplemented.
• A Constitution Committee to be associated with constitutional amendment proposals from the stage of formulation, so that amendments are not presented to the House like ordinary legislation. A proposal shaped through such a committee would carry greater authority and legitimacy, and would be less exposed to invalidation on basic-structure grounds.

Restoring financial control

• Enact the law contemplated by Article 292 fixing limits on Union borrowing, so that a charge on future generations requires prospective legislative sanction rather than retrospective audit.
• Pre-budget scrutiny by the standing committees of departmental demands, with reports laid before the general discussion rather than after it.
• Restrict the guillotine by allotting a minimum number of days to demands for grants and requiring the House to select the ministries examined.
• Strengthen the follow-up on CAG reports with a statutory obligation on ministries to respond to Public Accounts Committee findings within a fixed period, and a mechanism for the House to take note of persistent non-compliance.

The member and the institution

• Separate the national role of the MP from local works. Members of Parliament are representatives for the whole of India and should concern themselves with national questions, leaving local problems to panchayats and municipalities.
  • MPLADS, which places roughly five crore rupees a year at each member’s discretion, creates exactly the role conflict that this separation is meant to avoid — it recasts a legislator as a local executive disbursing funds, and gives constituents a reason to judge him on culverts rather than on legislation.
  • It also sits uneasily with the constitutional scheme after the 73rd and 74th Amendments, which assigned local development to elected local bodies.
• Professional induction and continuing training for members, irrespective of party, covering the Constitution, the Rules of Procedure, precedents, committee method, budget analysis and the practical mechanics of the House — with the emphasis on operational reality rather than the rule book.
• Codify parliamentary privileges. Undefined privileges in a democracy are an anachronism, and the uncertainty falls on the press and the public rather than on the House.
  • Codification would fix the boundary between Article 105 and Articles 19(1)(a), 20 and 21, which the Court addressed in Raja Ram Pal (2007) without settling.
  • India has imprisoned journalists for contempt of the House within living memory; Britain has not imprisoned anyone for breach of privilege since the nineteenth century, and Australia has codified. Uncodified privileges are effectively a fragment of British parliamentary sovereignty surviving inside a Constitution that is supreme.
• Restore the Deputy Speaker convention: elect the Deputy Speaker within a fixed period of the House’s first sitting, from the opposition, by writing the timeline into the Rules if Article 93’s “as soon as may be” cannot be made enforceable.
• Depoliticise the chair. The Speaker’s decisions on money-bill certification, disqualification under the Tenth Schedule, and the admission of motions are all unreviewable or nearly so, and all are taken by a presiding officer who retains party membership and expects to contest again.
• Rebuild the institution’s public standing through Parliament’s own communication rather than through the incentives of competitive broadcasting — the House is the communication link between the people and the government, and its image is a condition of its authority.
• No single reform is a cure. Parliamentary reform, party and electoral reform, and judicial reform are interdependent, and each depends on a political consensus that has to be built rather than imposed — which is an argument for an integrated and unhurried programme, not for postponement.
• Legislate on criminal antecedents, which the Supreme Court has twice expressly left to Parliament — the obvious minimum being disqualification on the framing of charges for serious offences a specified period before nomination, with safeguards against motivated prosecution.

Contemporary developments

• The 2026 delimitation defeat established that the special majority under Article 368 remains an operative constraint even on a government with a working majority — a constitutional amendment can be defeated on the floor, and one has been.
• The Women’s Reservation Act is notified but not operative, and its operation now depends on a delimitation exercise that Parliament has declined to authorise — a reform whose implementation was deliberately made conditional on a second decision that has since failed.
• Simultaneous elections remain under examination: the Constitution (129th Amendment) Bill, 2024 and the accompanying Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2024 were referred to a 31-member Joint Parliamentary Committee chaired by P.P. Chaudhary, following the high-level committee under Ram Nath Kovind that reported in March 2024. The JPC’s tenure has been extended repeatedly through 2026.
  • The referral itself is significant: the most far-reaching constitutional proposal before Parliament did go to a committee, which shows the machinery works when the House chooses to use it.
  • The substantive objection is federal — synchronising state assembly terms with the Lok Sabha’s requires curtailing or extending assemblies elected on their own mandates, which touches the federal principle the Court has named a basic feature.
• The money-bill reference remains pending, and each new certification — most recently of a bill altering the strength of the Supreme Court — enlarges the practical consequence of a question the Court has not answered for seven years.
• The 2026 monsoon session produced the lowest Lok Sabha functioning figure in a decade alongside eleven bills passed, most of them in minutes: the two facts together describe the condition precisely — legislative output has not fallen, legislative deliberation has.

Conclusion

The Indian Parliament retains every instrument its design gave it. What has been lost is not authority but use: a chamber that meets for fifty-odd days a year, refers one bill in ten to a committee, votes most of the budget without discussion and has left a constitutional office vacant for six years is not being overruled — it is declining to act.

• Nothing in the reform agenda requires a new constitution. It requires a minimum calendar, compulsory committee reference, independent research and costing capacity, a codified law of privilege, a borrowing ceiling under Article 292, and the restoration of conventions never written down because no one imagined they would need to be.
• Ambedkar’s warning was that a constitution cannot supply the conduct on which it depends. The decline of Parliament is the most precise available measurement of that gap.