Parties in Lok Sabha
An analysis of 17 parties, which have at least 4 MPs in Parliament, shows that Bharatiya Janata Party MPs have highest attendance, followed by Lok Jan Shakti Party, Biju Janata Dal and Communist Party of India (M).
Among those with lowest average attendance are Aam Aadmi Party, All India Trinamool Congress, Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress and Telangana Rashtra Samithi.
While CPI (M) and Rashtriya Janata Dal participate in most debates, LJSP and AITC join least number of debates.
Parties from Maharashtra – Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party – ask most questions. This makes NCP’s Supriya Sule, Dhananjay Bhimrao Mahadik and Shiv Sena’s Shrirang Appa Barne top quizzers.
Unlike popular perception, AAP and AITC are the ones that rarely ask questions in Lok Sabha.
Age, on these four parameters, doesn’t matter much as some MPs in their 70s are more active than those in their 30s. On an average, when we divided the data as per 10-year age bracket, an interesting fact came across — all age groups are equally active with 70-80% attendance range.
Sixteenth Lok Sabha is heavily male dominated with just about 10% women MPs. On the four performance indicators used for this analysis, women MPs perform equally well as their male counterparts, revealing that the biggest roadblock in gender balance in legislature in the bias in ticket distribution among political parties.
On all four parameters, Congress MPs fail to score big. Numbers, as they say, don’t lie.
(Primary data source: PRS Legislative Research)
***