Subhas Chandra Pattanayak
Legislative Assembly is meant to discharge two duties: Monitoring administration and Adopting Legislations.
Monitoring administration is meant to save the State from ruins and to ensure that the Ministry makes the executive perform properly; but my memory doesn’t help me finding if it has ever happened specifically since the present Chief Minister has taken over.
Now, looking at the other duty of it I feel the Legislature has made a farce of it. August 27, 2008 will be remembered for this farce. As many as five Bills have been adopted this day without application of collective legislative mind! That the House was adjourned 13 times on this day, as noisiness could not be controlled is enough to indicate under what environment the Bills were adopted.
Adoption of so many Bills including the Orissa Excise Bill, 2008 within an hour (as many as four Bills were passed within 34 minutes!) sans detail democratic discussion and that too under high-pitch uproars over collapse of law and order in the State that had totally shattered the audibility in the House is a phenomenon that may not look technically unlegislative; but it can hardly help their fair implementation as in absence of interpellant participation of legislators in their passing, legislative intention, which is most important for correct administration of law, has not been properly promoted, vetted and defined.
For more than three decades I have been covering the sessions of Orissa Assembly, but such mockery in making Laws had never been seen.