Srinagar, June 20
Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar today said some important decisions had been taken recently to make Question Hour more effective from the 5th session of the 15th Lok Sabha.

This would meet the long-felt need to regulate Question Hour, Meira Kumar said while inaugurating the 75th All-India Presiding Officers Conference at the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Complex here today.

She said Question Hour had a special significance in the proceedings of the House, particularly in ventilating the grievances of the public in matters concerning the administration and the working of the ministers and their allied departments and organisations.

Elaborating, she said the hitherto minimum and maximum period of 10 and 21 days, respectively, for giving notices by members for questions had been done away with and a uniform period of 15 days had been prescribed.

Secondly, the Speaker had now been vested with powers to direct answer to a starred question of a member who was absent in the House when his or her name was called.

Thirdly, a member was now required to make a statement in the House correcting the reply given by him or her earlier, irrespective of the fact whether the reply given pertained to a starred, unstarred or short notice question. Further, the number of notices for questions which a member was entitled to give, both for oral and written answers in a day, had been limited to 10.

Meira Kumar said “we will be discussing two issues of enormous parliamentary importance, namely, the growing tendency to disrupt Question Hour and the need to check it, and the the committee system in Parliament and the need to strengthen it ”.

She said with expanding functions of modern legislatures, there had been a corresponding increase in the use of committees in almost all legislative bodies. In fact, the committee system had been widely acclaimed as the best suited device for a detailed scrutiny of administrative actions for enforcing executive accountability to the legislature and, through it, to the people at large, she added.

The conference was a platform to share experiences about managing the affairs of legislatures more professionally, the Speaker said.