A "large proportion" of Delhi legislators raised "very few questions" in the Assembly this year, a Mumbai-based NGO today alleged.
Praja Foundation today released the Delhi MLA Report Card 2017 and claimed that the data was primarily collected through RTI and a survey of over 24,000 people spread across the national capital.
The ruling AAP, which has 65 lawmakers in the 70-member Assembly, when contacted said it "doubted the findings".
"We doubt the credibility of this organisation and the reports the NGO has been bringing out," AAP spokesperson Saurabh Bhardwaj said.
Founder and Managing Trustee of the Foundation, Nitai Mehta said 57 MLAs from the AAP and two MLAs from the BJP were ranked in the report card.
"According to the analysis conducted by our organisation, as many as 18 members raised five issues or less in 2017, according to RTI queries. Seven MLAs did not raise even a single issue in 2017," the NGO claimed.
Incidentally, the report was released a day ahead of the Bawana bypolls, and Mehta claimed that he was "not aware of the date of the election."
"If our Delhi team had alerted us, we would have rescheduled it. We definitely would not want our report to influence the voters," he said.
When asked, why Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Delhi ministers were not included in the report, he contended, "We only wanted to include MLAs who can raise questions, and since ministers do not raise questions, so they were excluded."
The NGO, further said, "The quality of issues raised by the MLAs reduced from 39 per cent in 2016 to 35.8 per cent in 2017. The total number of issues raised by the MLAs also reduced from 951 last year to 926 in 2017."
The NGO also alleged that there has been an "increase" in the number of MLAs having criminal records.
Incidentally, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) in July had issued a notice to the Praja Foundation for "misinterpreting" facts in a health report, in which it claimed that dengue cases have seen a massive rise of 265 per cent in Mumbai in the last five years.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)