Oppn served 14 adjournment motion notices, 4 not admitted

Thiruvananthapuram: As many as 14 notices seeking leave for adjournment motion served by the opposition seeking discussion and debate came before the consideration of the House in the eighth session of the 15th assembly that abruptly ended on Tuesday after meeting for 21 days.
Of these, four notices were not even admitted by the speaker, which turned out to be the main reason for the stalemate between the ruling front and the opposition in the assembly leading to untoward events and ending the session by passing the bills without even discussions. Until the chief minister was left furious when Mathew Kuzhalnadan raised the controversial Wadakkanchery Life Mission project as adjournment motion on February 28, the government had been admitting all the notices on all subjects, including on food safety (served by Anoop Jacob), water tariff hike (by M Vincent), progress of Life housing project (by P K Basheer) and police atrocity against protesting Youth Congress men (by Shafi Parambil).
The first notice to be declined was on March 1, when Roji M John served a notice citing state’s inefficiency in collecting the taxes and the state losing Rs 25,000 crore for which it is eligible for from the IGST pool. The decision to decline the notice by the speaker came as a surprise as the subject could have been easily discussed and debated.
On the very next day, the speaker also refused to admit the notice regarding the salary issue in the state-run KSRTC served by M Vincent, citing that the matter is under the consideration of the court. These back-to-back incidents of declining the notices seeking adjournment motion strained the relations between the opposition and the ruling front inside the house. The protests hit a new high when two more notices were declined by the speaker on March 14 and 15 first one by Roji M John regarding the police intervention in Kochi corporation council meeting and the next one by Uma Thomas regarding the attack on a 16-year-old girl on the outskirts of the capital.
The opposition resorted to new modes of protest on these two days it held a parallel session inside the assembly on March 14 and protested in front of the speaker’s chamber on the next day which was for the first time in the history of the assembly. Though notices on relevant subjects were prepared and served on the consecutive days as well that included the subjects like attack on the UDF MLAs by the watch and ward and the police cases against them (notice served by C R Mahesh), holding the teachers to ransom in the Government Law College in the capital (by M Vincent) and molesting a woman in-patient in Kozhikode medical college (by K K Rema), the assembly session was dismissed even before these were even considered.