Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu seeks report on attendance at House panel meetings

|HT|

Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu has sought a report on attendance at parliamentary standing committee meetings when the lawmakers were entitled to a special allowance to attend them. People aware of the matter said the Rajya Sabha secretariat was asked to prepare the report after some lawmakers said at an informal interaction with Naidu that the allowance was an added incentive for many to attend the meetings regularly.

Lawmakers get ₹2,000 as a daily allowance for attending Parliament and House panel meetings. They also received a special allowance amounting to 25% of the cost of their air travel to attend the meetings before it was done away with when late Arun Jaitley was the finance minister in 2018.

“The Rajya Sabha chairman has asked the secretariat to find out the rate of attendance when this allowance was in place. While there is no plan to revive the allowance, the study is being done to see how the attendance of MPs (members of Parliament) can be improved,” said a Rajya Sabha official, who did not want to be named.

(Except for the headline and the pictorial description, this story has not been edited by THE DEN staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)