Parliamentary Committees and Their Role in Legislative Scrutiny
Keywords:
legislative scrutiny, standing committees, executive accountability, Lok Sabha, IndiaAbstract
Parliamentary committees are the principal mechanism through which legislatures examine bills in detail, consult outside interests, and assess executive proposals before they become law. In India, department-related standing committees were established in 1993 to review the work of ministries and, in certain cases, to examine bills referred to them. This paper analyses how these committees contribute to legislative scrutiny. It combines a review of the procedural and comparative literature with an empirical study of 360 bills referred to standing committees during the 15th and 16th Lok Sabha terms (2009–2019). Each bill was coded for whether its committee report was tabled, whether the report recommended amendments, how the government responded to the recommendations, and the number of days between referral and report. Of the 360 referred bills, 298 (82.8%) received a committee report, and 214 of those reports (71.8%) recommended amendments. The government fully accepted recommendations in 102 of the 214 cases (47.7%) and partly accepted them in 79 (36.9%), so that recommendations were incorporated in 84.6% of cases. The government response did not differ significantly across the two terms (χ²(2) = 0.06, p = 0.969). Reports took longer to produce in the 15th term (M = 127.4 days) than in the 16th (M = 98.6 days), a difference that was significant (t = 5.78, df = 296, p < 0.001, d = 0.66). The findings suggest that committees exert substantial influence on bills, that this influence is stable across terms, and that the main cost of committee scrutiny is time.References
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Copyright (c) 2026 Dr Kanta Verma (Author)
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