Column : Understand lobbying to regulate it
Our government is now mulling the introduction of a legal framework to govern lobbying, which has heretofore been largely unregulated, except when it crosses the line into outright corruption. Most would agree that some form of lobbying serves a useful function, since government would find itself hard-pressed to accumulate all relevant information about complex legislative topics. Decisions taken without the benefit of such information would risk endangering the interests of one or other group of stakeholders without the ability for these groups to influence the decision-making process. So, banning lobbying outright doesn’t seem feasible.
In the US, the practice is widely prevalent, with over 12,000 lobbyists spending over $2 billion in 2010 to influence policy outcomes. Of course the US is not precisely the right comparison for a parliamentary democracy with a whip system such as India (in the US, there is no hard ‘party line’ that Congressmen need to toe, unlike in India). The UK may be a more reasonable comparison, given that a whip system operates there as well. Again, the UK
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