Parliament passed 12 Bills. On nine, only the minister spoke

Across 19 sitting days, MPs spoke for a total of 12 hours and eight minutes. Of the 487 the House tracks, 430 said nothing on any government bill.

The Lok Sabha took four minutes to pass a bill adding four judges to the Supreme Court. It had set aside four hours.

No Member of Parliament spoke on it except the minister who moved it. The bill takes the court's strength from 33 judges to 37, and still needs the President's assent to become law.

That was not the exception. Parliament's monsoon session ended on August 13. No date was announced for the next one. In the four weeks it ran, the Lok Sabha passed 12 bills. Of the 11 that PRS Legislative Research timed, nine were passed without a single MP speaking apart from the minister in charge.

Here is what that looks like, bill by bill. The column on the right counts MPs who spoke, not including the minister moving it.

The Mines and Minerals Bill, which changes how the government hands out mining rights, took five minutes. The Registration of Births and Deaths Bill took two. Both went through with nobody speaking but the minister.

Only one bill was genuinely debated: the law against cheating and paper leaks in public exams, which took just under 11 hours with 48 MPs speaking. It has since received the President's assent, along with two others passed this session. All three are now Acts.

The same bills got a very different hearing next door. The Rajya Sabha passed almost the same list. It behaved nothing like the Lok Sabha.

Every bill it passed got at least 40 minutes, and between 11 and 35 MPs spoke on each. The Supreme Court bill that took four minutes in the Lok Sabha took two hours and 21 minutes there, with 33 MPs speaking. Whatever stopped the Lower House debating was not the calendar.

THE QUIETEST SESSION SINCE 2024

Add up every minute any MP spent speaking in the Lok Sabha across those four weeks, on any subject, and it comes to 12 hours and eight minutes. That is the lowest figure for any session since this Parliament was elected in 2024. Almost all of it, 11 of the 12 hours, went on legislation — because very little else got done.

Only 57 of the 487 MPs the House tracks spoke on a government bill, according to the Lok Sabha's own participation records. In the budget session that ended in April, 224 did.

And those 11 hours were not shared out. The 10 MPs who spoke longest took 46 per cent of the time. The top 20 took just under 69 per cent. The single longest turn was Rahul Gandhi's. The Leader of the Opposition spoke for 56 minutes. The House spent only one minute in every 12 on law-making all session.

Everyone else got scraps. The middle-ranking speaker got seven minutes and 27 seconds. Thirteen of the 57 got under five minutes. Six of the 57 were ministers, who spoke because it is their job to move the bill.

IT WAS NOT ONE SIDE WALKING OUT

The obvious explanation for a silent House is that the Opposition stayed away. The numbers say otherwise.

Counting parties with at least eight MPs on the tracked list, 93.8 per cent of Bharatiya Janata Party MPs said nothing on any government bill. For the Congress, the figure was 93.9 per cent. That’s a difference of one-tenth of one percentage point. Every party in that group falls between 81.8 and 93.9 per cent. First-time MPs were quieter than veterans, 92.9 per cent against 82.7.

MPs also did not run out of issues to raise. The rules let an MP put a matter on the official record in writing, without speaking to it. In four weeks, MPs filed 487 such matters. Every one of them logged zero minutes because not one was read aloud.

Strip those written filings out and count only MPs who actually spoke about anything at all, and the number is 89, against 398 in the budget session. A further 234 MPs took part in the entire session only on paper.

THE GOVERNMENT'S OWN SCORECARD

Kiren Rijiju, the Union Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, gave his own account as the session closed. He said the Lok Sabha worked 19 per cent of the hours it was scheduled to sit, and the Rajya Sabha 39 per cent. PRS Legislative Research, which works out the same figure from the Houses' records, puts both lower: 15 and 33 per cent, respectively.

Neither side has shown how it got there, and the government's is the kinder of the two numbers.

Rijiju blamed the Opposition. "This is the first time the Opposition was running away from discussions," he said. He was right on one count: only one bill, he said, "underwent a full discussion in the Lok Sabha", and the figures bear that out. He was wrong about who went quiet. His own party's MPs were as silent as the Opposition's.

A DISRUPTION THAT NO LONGER STOPS ANYTHING

None of this is new for a monsoon session. In 2025, just 17 MPs spoke on a government bill, and 14 bills went through with "limited discussion", some within a week of being introduced.

What has changed is what the House does while the shouting goes on. That session gave bills one hour and 16 minutes in total. This one gave them 11 hours and passed 12 of them.

A year ago, the disruption stopped the laws. This time the laws went through anyway.

- Ends