Probing the Pathways of Public Interest Legislation and Public Policy in India: An Analytical Study of Potentialities of Private Members’ Bill

Speaker:
Prof. Ravi Ranjan
Fellow, Rajya Sabha, Parliament of India,
Professor, Department of Political Science Zakir Husain Delhi College of Law,  University of Delhi

Abstract:

Public policy’s umbilical cord is attached with the legislation, and its success and failures depend on how legislative process has considered the public interest. The legislature through its deliberations not only frame the policies but also gives legitimacy to the public policy. Therefore, this paper seeks to understand the legislative process in India by contextualizing the public interests of our daily life and its democratization through legislative process initiated by private members’ bill (PMBs) in India.  Legislative data on PMBs of last seven decades suggest about the potentials of PMBs and their influences on public policy in India, we do need to address few pertinent questions like: 1) Why and how representative democracies are failing to accommodate larger voices in legislative process, 2) How public policy theme, its conceptualizations and related discourse are getting affected in parliamentary democracies like ours through such legislative initiatives (PMBs). A revisit to the idea of primacy of legislature by analyzing how PMBs data are taking up issues of immediate public concerns and having wider impact on public policy legislations, this lecture argues that modern democracies are being dominated by political party led executives as far as legislative businesses are  concerned. Hence, a study of legislative data on PMBs have the potential to enhance the voices of democratic deliberations and can facilitate the methodological innovations in policy discourse.