78 pc RS members attended proceedings every day, says internal House analysis of last seven sessions

By Naveen Kapoor
New Delhi [India], October 4 : A first-ever quantitative indication of the extent of participation of Members of Parliament in the proceedings has shown that a high 78 per cent of the members of Rajya Sabha attend the proceedings of the House every day in the last seven sessions.
According to sources, the figures were revealed in the analysis of the attendance of the members of Rajya Sabha undertaken with Chairman Venkaiah Naidu desiring to know the pattern of participation of members in the proceedings of the House.
Source told ANI that Rajya Sabha Secretariat analyzed the attendance of the members over the last seven sessions - 248th to 254th - held during 2019 till the last monsoon session of 2021, lasting a total of 138 sittings.
With the ministers, Deputy Chairman, Leader of the House and Leader of the Opposition not required to sign the attendance register, about 225 Members marked their attendance daily as required under the Members of Parliament (Salary and Allowances) Act.
"The highest daily attendance of 82.57 per cent was reported during the last 254th Session while a low of 72.88 per cent was recorded during the preceding one. During this period, 29.14 per cent reported full attendance while only 1.90 per cent never attended the proceedings for various reasons and were granted leave of absence by the House," a source said.
The analysis revealed that COVID-19 pandemic did not impact the attendance during the last three sessions which were held under the COVID protocols. During the 252nd session, the first to be held under COVID protocol, 99 members accounting for 44.19 per cent of the total, attended the proceedings during all the 10 sittings while 98 accounting for 46 per cent did so during the 17 sittings of 254th Session.
Session-wise, the number of members with full attendance ranged from 34 (15.27 per cent) during the 251st session to 98 (46 per cent) during the 254th session.
The number of members with zero attendance ranged from just two (0.90 per cent) during the 248th session to 21 (9.38 per cent) during the 252nd, the first to be held under the COVID-19 protocol.
Under the statute, the members are required to sign the attendance register during every sitting of the House failing which they are not entitled to the daily allowance.
According to analysis regarding the participation of individual members in the proceedings of the House, 75-year old SR Balasubramoniyan participated in the proceedings of all the 138 sittings of these 7 sessions.
Five members - Dr Ashok Bajpai, Lt Gen (Dr) DP Vats (retired), Neeraj Shekhar, Vikas Mahtme and Ramkumar Verma - fully attended six sessions.
Seven Members viz., Rakesh Sinha, Sudhanshu Trivedi, Dr Kailash Soni, Naresh Gujral, Vishambar Prasad Nishad, Kumar Ketkar and Amee Yagnik had full attendance for five sessions.
Jaya Bachchan, Jairam Ramesh, Bhupender Yadav, Dr Satyanarayan Jatiya, KJ Alphons, TG Venkatesh, K Ravindra Kumar, PC Gupta, Viplove Thakur, Kanta Kardam, and K Somprasad were among 18 members who had fully attended 4 sessions.
Other members including Anand Sharma, Vayalar Ravi, Dr CP Thakur, Bhubaneswar Kalita, Shiv Pratap Shukla, Prasanna Acharya, GVL Narasimha Rao, KK Ragesh, Manoj Kumar Jha, K Vanlalvena and GC Chandrashekhar were among 30 who had full participation in 3 of the 7 sessions.
Former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, AK Antony, P Chidambaram, Anil Jain, OP Mathur, Swapan Dasgupta, Dr Subramanian Swamy, A. Navaneethakrishnan, Pratap Singh Bajwa, Ramnath Thakur, Praful Patel, Shanta Chhetri, Tiruchi Siva, Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, V Vijayasai Reddy were among 70 with full attendance in two of the seven sessions. Another 57 members attended one full session each.