NEW DELHI: A meeting of the
joint parliamentary committee on the
land acquisition bill, set up in 2015, could not be conducted on Tuesday since only six out of 30 members of the panel turned up for it which was far below the required number for a quorum for the meeting.
Apart from committee chairman Ganesh Singh, a Lok Sabha MP from
BJP, secretaries from the civil aviation and highways ministry had come for the meeting on Tuesday, and six other members including three from the ruling BJP, apart from Derek O'Brien from TMC, Bhartruhari Mahtab from BJD and Vir Singh from BSP waited for half an hour on Tuesday for others to join and finally left without conducting any business, it is learnt.
According to opposition party sources, "it seemed the ruling party is no longer interested in this bill, as most of them did not even turn up for the meeting being held after a long gap."
The
Narendra Modi government's enthusiasm for the land bill seems to have died out since the time it was brought in with amendments to an earlier version in 2015. Having failed to move ahead with the bill then the government sent it to a joint parliamentary committee which was then headed by BJP MP SS Ahluwalia. After Ahluwalia was made a minister, his party colleague Ganesh Singh took over as chairman of the committee of 30 members.
That government seems to have lost interest in the bill was clear from the dwindling number of meetings that the JPC had over the last three years. While the committee met 14 times in two months between June and July of 2015 and held 19 meetings in 2015 itself, the frequency dropped to two meetings in 2016 and four meetings in 2017. Tuesday's meeting could not even take off.
"They've lost the plot. Chairman (a BJP MP) of
Parliament Committee on Land Acquisition Act calls meeting. Woefully short of quorum. 6/31 MPs. Meeting called off. Even BJP members ditch. Hmmm," tweeted O'Brien after the meeting failed to take off.
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