Woodrow Wilson wrote that Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work. Has India’s Parliament abandoned work? Examine with reference to the functioning of Departmentally Related Standing Committees.

Wilson's observation identified a structural truth that transcends the American context: the deliberative core of any legislature lies not on the floor where speech is performative and outcomes predetermined but in the committee room, where expertise meets accountability away from the electoral gaze.

Applied to India, the question is not whether Parliament continues to meet but whether it continues to work in Wilson's sense. The evidence from

Departmentally Related Standing Committees Parliament's primary institutional mechanism for this work — is deeply troubling, though not uniformly so.

DRSCs were created in 1993 as "the backbone of our parliamentary system." Their in-camera functioning deliberately insulated from floor theatrics was designed to produce the frank, expert-driven deliberation that Wilson identified as Parliament's real work. For their first decade, this design broadly functioned: the 14th Lok Sabha referred 71% of bills to committees.

The trajectory since then constitutes institutional self-abandonment.

• Expert and specialised scrutiny: Parliamentary debates are general and political, while committees examine subjects ministry-wise.
  • A DRSC on Home Affairs or on Finance can study a Bill or policy in greater technical depth than the full House.
• Less partisan and more deliberative space:: Floor debates are often shaped by party whips, media visibility and political confrontation.
• Evidence-based lawmaking: Committees can call officials, experts, civil society groups, industry bodies and affected stakeholders.
• Clause-by-clause and policy scrutiny: The House often debates a Bill politically, but committees can examine each clause and identify drafting defects, constitutional concerns, fiscal implications and implementation gaps. Thus committees can actually convert broad politics into workable law.
• Calendar independence: Parliament meets for very limited sittings, but committees function throughout the year. Through Demands for Grants, Action Taken Reports and ministry-wise reviews the committees keep the executive under continuing scrutiny even when the House is not in session. 12.5 Yet recent practice shows serious abandonment of this mechanism.
• The percentage of bills referred to DRSCs collapsed from 71% in the 14th Lok Sabha to 16% in the 17th — the lowest since the system's creation.
• The Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023), with sweeping Article 21 implications, was passed without committee referral despite its predecessor undergoing two years of JPC scrutiny.
• The BNS, BNSS, and BSA were passed with 146 Opposition MPs suspended, after the Standing Committee on Home Affairs raised concerns that went unaddressed.

Issues with the functioning of committees?

• The one-year term destroys expertise continuity.
• The absence of dedicated research staff makes committees analytically dependent on the ministries they oversee.
• Indian DRSCs rely on generalist Secretariat staff, meaning committee reports frequently reflect the evidence submitted by the very ministries under scrutiny, converting oversight into a managed information exercise.

No additional remuneration produces chronic absenteeism.

• DRSC members are reconstituted annually preventing the accumulation of subject-matter depth that effective oversight requires.

Committee membership carries no financial incentive and no electoral visibility PRS found average DRSC attendance below 50% in the 17th Lok Sabha.

Ministers are excluded from DRSCs by convention Ministries routinely delay furnishing documents to committees, and no legal penalty for noncompliance with committee summons exists, making the oversight relationship entirely voluntary on the executive's part.

• No comply-or-explain obligation: The government may receive exhaustive committee analysis and proceed unchanged, as it did with the BNS.
• The timing problem renders financial scrutiny structurally meaningless. DRSC reports on demands for grants sometimes arrive after the demands have already been voted upon — defeating the financial oversight purpose entirely and reducing the committee to a post-facto recorder of executive decisions.
  • The 18th Lok Sabha took three months to constitute its DRSCs — with government and Opposition locked in negotiation over chairmanship of key committees on finance, external affairs, and defence.

The strong committee = strong assembly principle — Wilson's core insight — is empirically verified by international comparison: Germany's Bundestag committees have legal powers to summon witnesses and compel documents; the UK's select committees can cite for contempt of Parliament; the US CRS ensures every committee has independent analytical capacity. India's DRSCs have none of these structural supports, making the comparison not merely unflattering but structurally diagnostic. A complete verdict requires acknowledging institutional persistence alongside institutional failure.

Where Parliament has not entirely abandoned work

• The Public Accounts Committee — chaired by convention by the

Opposition since 1967 — has continued producing consequential reports: its 2023 examination of PM-KISAN identified ₹2,700 crore in payments to ineligible beneficiaries. The 18th Lok Sabha referred the Waqf Amendment Bill and the simultaneous elections bills to JPCs — signalling partial renewal in response to sustained institutional criticism.

• The PAC chairmanship convention, though under stress, has broadly held. What these examples share is that they are exceptions sustained by political convention, not institutional design — fragile anchors in an otherwise deteriorating system.

The UK's Wright Reforms (2010) introduced five-year select committee terms precisely because the evidence showed that short tenures produce shallow scrutiny.

Unlike the US Congressional Research Service — which provides non-partisan expert analysis to every committee — India's Parliament is increasingly Congress on public exhibition and the committee rooms where it should be at work are structurally ill-equipped to house the work even when the political will exists.