In BAC, all parties reach consensus on curtailing monsoon session amid Covid-19 spread

By Pragya Kaushika
New Delhi [India], September 19 : Amid rising number of COVID cases in Parliament, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on Saturday called an urgent Business Advisory Committee (BAC) meeting of all parties where all unanimously decided to curtail the session.
As MPs emerged out of the meeting, all said that everyone agreed to have a curtailed session.
However, it has been left to the discretion of the speaker as to when and by how many days it should be curtailed.
"There was a demand from Congress and others to have a discussion on National Education Policy (NEP) and COVID. DMK's TR Baalu wanted to discuss Environment Impact Assessment as well whereas AITC wanted a discussion on GST as well along with all these issues. It will be seen as to how the speaker will adjust the legislation business," stated one of the MPs.
Another MP said that there was a discussion that if there is a spurt in Covid cases in the House, everything will come to a standstill. Might as well finish business on priority and curtail the session.
"We left it to the speaker. Session will be curtailed," said one of the participants.
Meanwhile, in the BAC, six bills were circulated for the discussion in coming days and were allotted time.
"In previous BAC, 14 items were discussed and out of that 8 had been discussed. Today they circulated 6 items for discussion," said a senior MP.
Those present in the meeting included Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, Adhir Ranjan Choudhary and K Suresh from Congress, YSRCP's PV Midhun Reddy, TDP's Ram Mohan Naidu, Ritesh Pandey from BSP, Kalyan Banerjee from AITC , Nama Nageshwar Rao from TRS, Pinaki Mishra from BJD, BJP's PP Chaudhary, Darshana Jardosh, Jagdambika Pal, DMK's TR Balu, Shiv Sena's Arvind Sawant, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Rajiv Ranjan from JDU, Rakesh Singh chief whip from BJP, Sunil Kumar Singh from BJP Jharkhand, MoS Parliamentary Affairs Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal.