By Yash Tiwari and Tottempudi
Twelve bills, one Monsoon Session, and 11 of them were cleared in under 15 minutes by Lok Sabha, despite being allotted up to five hours for debate. The numbers have triggered fresh debate on legislative scrutiny. Yash Tiwari and Tottempudi Gagan explain what happened, why it is not new, and what could actually fix it
l What exactly happened in this Monsoon Session?
BETWEEN JULY 29 and August 11, 2026, Lok Sabha passed 12 Bills. The Business Advisory Committee (BAC) — the body that allocates debate time to each Bill based on its complexity, had set aside between two and five hours per Bill. Eleven of the 12 used a fraction of that. The Mines and Minerals Development and Regulation (Amendment) Bill, 2026, got five minutes against a two-hour allocation. The Registration of Births and Deaths (Amendment) Bill took two minutes.
Only the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Bill ran long, exceeding its ten-hour allotment by nearly an hour; proof that when Parliament wants to debate, the mechanism still works.
l Is rushed passage a new trend?
HISTORICAL RECORDS SHOW this predates the current dispensation by a wide margin. Under UPA I (2004-09), 33 of 182 Bills — 18% of the total — passed with under five minutes of debate, including eight Bills cleared in a single 17-minute sitting on December 24, 2008. UPA II pushed through 20 Bills in five minutes or less, and in 2013 the Union Budget was passed with no discussion at all. The 2023 Monsoon Session moved so fast that the average Bill took just two days from introduction to clearing both Houses. Across 30 years and multiple governments, 30-40% of all Bills have passed with what is termed as “no significant debate.”
l If it is not new, what is actually driving it?
THE PATTERN IS structural rather than partisan. Floor time is scarce, sessions routinely lose days to disruption, and the BAC’s time allocations are advisory, not binding. So, when a Session runs short, the backlog gets crammed into the final days rather than triggering an extension. Governments of every stripe have used this slack the same way: push Bills through in whatever window remains. The deeper shift, though, is quieter: a steady decline in how often Bills go to Standing Committees for detailed scrutiny before they ever reach the floor, which has made floor time the only scrutiny many bills get at all.
l What happened to referral of Bills to Standing Committees?
THIS IS THE number that matters most, and it’s had the least attention. Since Parliamentary Committees meet throughout the year, they help in making up for the lack of time available on the floor of the House.
However, referral of Bills to Standing Committees, where a Bill gets clause-by-clause examination away from the floor’s theatrics, with ministry officials and outside experts weighing in, has fallen from 60% of Bills in the 14th Lok Sabha to roughly 20-25% today. That is not a dip; it is a structural withdrawal from the one mechanism designed specifically to compensate for thin floor debate. When a Bill skips both floor debate and committee referral, it has, in practical terms, skipped Parliament’s scrutiny function entirely.
l Does this actually produce bad legislation?
BOTH, AND THE first is documented. The IT (Amendment) Act, 2008, passed after roughly 40 minutes of debate; Section 66A, inserted through it, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2015 as unconstitutionally vague, exactly the defect committee scrutiny exists to catch. The Companies Act, 2013, a wide-ranging corporate law rewrite, needed substantive amendments within two years of enactment.
Beyond individual laws, there is an accountability cost: without committee records, there is no contemporaneous paper trail showing objections were raised before a law fails in implementation. And there is a public-trust cost: minutes-long passage, reported alongside images of an empty or disrupted House, feeds a perception of Parliament as a rubber stamp.
l What can be done to fix this?
THE PERTINENT QUESTION here is not whether one government is uniquely disrespectful of Parliament — the data would not settle that. It is why the system keeps rewarding speed over deliberation regardless of who is in office. That question has answers.
Parliament could publish an annual calendar every January guaranteeing at least 100 sitting days, with lost days automatically compensated rather than absorbed into the backlog.
BAC time allocations could be made binding, so a Session losing sitting time to disruption gets an extension or special sitting, not a rushed final hour. Standing Committee referral could become the default, bypassed only for an affirmative reason such as genuine urgency, reversing today’s practice where referral is optional and increasingly rare.
Private members’ time on Friday afternoons, routinely the first casualty of a disrupted Session, as this Monsoon Session showed again— could be statutorily protected from cancellation as well.
The writers are winners of the Legislative Assistant to Members of Parliament (LAMP) fellowship awarded by PRS Legislative Research