Parliamentary Committees



 1. Parliament functions through its committees. They function on a non-party basis makes them a unique because parliamentarians are hardcore politicians.

 2. They are created by the Houses of Parliament to scrutinise governmental activities. 

3. They find facts and make recommendations to the government which are of non binding nature. 

Non partisan nature 

1. They are set up by the Houses to unearth the facts about an issue of public importance and if the members act like politicians, ruling party MPs are unlikely to allow facts that are against government interest. 

2. The rules do not allow the presence of the media in the meetings of the committees and ministers are not allowed to appear as witnesses to give evidence before the committees. 

3.The proceedings are confidential and no one is permitted to make it public. Hence, members do not take a political stand on issues before the committee. 

4. But the recent controversy over the IT committee summoning an official from Facebook as a witness threatens the non partisan nature of committees.

 Summoning a witness 

1. As per well-established practices and the internal working rules of the parliamentary committees, the names of the witnesses are prepared by the Secretariat of the Committee in a draft and is later approved by the chairman of the Committee. 

2. It is not placed before the committee for its approval as only those witnesses suggested by the majority can be called for examination and the committee may be deprived of a neutral witness. 

3. According to rule 270 of the Rules of Procedure, the question of whether a witness is relevant or not will be decided by the Speaker and not through a vote in the committee. 

4. The selection of a witness can be challenged only on the ground of relevance to the subject. Source: The Indian Express.

Mobile data for policy making. 

1.Information produced as a passive by-product of the use of mobile network services can be a transformative resource for social good. 

2. Research projects have shown the feasibility of using mobile data to predict or track disease outbreaks, improve transportation flows, and to respond more effectively in humanitarian crises. 

3. The State of Mobile Data for Social Good report of the United Nations identifies over 200 projects or studies leveraging mobile data for social good. 

Examples: 

1. Anonymised data from mobile phone networks can be used to predict the poverty and wealth of individual subscribers and created high-resolution maps of the geographic distribution of wealth in Rwanda. 

2. In the US, the mobile location data was used during Covid-19,to lessen their travel and curb the spread of the virus. 

3. In India, the call records of migrant workers could be used for skilling, redeploying and even validating the database with the existing databases like PMJDY, Ujjwala, PMAY, Ayushman Bharat etc.

 4. This will give the government a clear idea of the intended beneficiaries and also build up a credit history of such borrowers at the bottom of the pyramid.