The Great MP Makeover

AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, SITTING IN THE LOK Sabha press gallery at night with just one other news agency reporter, I kept looking down to peek at the list of members on the speaker’s table, right below my seat, trying to figure out how many more would take part in the debate on the Railway Budget. The MPs strolled in and out. Those in the House waited for their turn, some sleepy. Yet no one wanted to cut short their speech, or take the chair’s advice to lay the papers on the table. The chair frequently reminded them that the time allotted to their party was over. Earlier that evening, seeing my name on late-night Parliament duty, I had winced at the thought of sitting through the discussion, which I felt would nei­ther make interesting copy nor end before the wee hours of the morning. The debate stretched from the crucial to the trivial. It is not that seek­ing conversion of metre gauge to broad gauge was inconsequential, but did parliamentarians have to dedicate their time so late to take it up in the House?

Around that time, Pramod Mahajan, the parliamentary affairs minister in the Vajpayee government, in one of his media debriefings, said he wondered why there should be a separate Rail Budget. It took more than a decade after that for the Rail Budget to be merged with the Union Budget, with the Narendra Modi government agreeing to a recommendation by the Bibek Debroy panel and ending what it saw as a colonial practice. The two Budgets had been separated in 1924, on the recommendation of a committee, headed by British railway economist William Acworth and comprising 10 members, three of whom were Indians, at a time when the Railway Budget constituted 84 per cent of the total Budget. It was presented prior to the general Budget, with time allocated for discussion on it. While the two Budgets have been presented together since 2017-18, lengthy debates on railways survived the merger, with one of the longest ones being in 2022. A first-time Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP in the current Lok Sabha, Shashank Mani, quips that the focus has, however, now turned to demands for Vande Bharat trains, a su­perfast express on medium to long-distance routes, from members on both sides of the aisle. “The pursuit of meaning of life is most important,” says the MP from Deoria in eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP), who recently connected ISRO scientists to 600 village pradhans and Block Development Council members to create awareness about how space technology can help rural development. The aspirations of voters have changed. So has the role of a parliamentarian.

But things were different for those who had been MPs in the days when demand for basic amenities outnumbered availability. They had to deal with requests like LPG cylinders, landline phone connections, railway booking confirmations and Kendriya Vidyalaya admissions, all of which were in short supply. Every MP had a specified quota, from which he or she could allocate these amenities, which were the predominant concerns of the constituents at that time, reflecting inside the House in questions, debates and speeches. As times changed from a scarce economy to having access to core needs, it freed MPs from the quota-doling chores, bringing a sense of relief that they would no longer be judged by those yardsticks. A four-time Left MP says if a hundred people from the constituency sought admissions and only 10 got them from the MP’s quota, then the member would face the ire of 90 voters. He recalls that in the 1980s, before becoming an MP, his family got a gas coupon through a parliamentarian and it was “such a big thing” then.

“Outside my door, there used to be a long queue of parents seeking admis­sions for their children in Kendriya Vidyalayas. The quota for an MP was a maxi­mum 10 admissions a year,” says Trinamool Congress’ Saugata Roy. The scheme, introduced in 1975, was scrapped in 2022 by the Modi government. A year later, to a question in the House if the MPs’ Kendriya Vidyalaya quotas would be revived, the government ruled it out saying it had been granted over and above the sanctioned strength of 40 students per section and adversely affected the student-teacher ratio. In the 1970s, MPs had to even make recommendations for HMT watches, India’s first homegrown wristwatch manufactured by the PSU Hindustan Machine Tools, when those were in short supply, recalls Roy. He had won his first Lok Sabha election as a Congress candidate from West Bengal’s Bar­rackpore in 1977, after Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi who, incidentally, was known to have had a penchant for HMT’s ‘Janata’ watch. Similar was the case with Fiat cars, says Tathagata Satpathy, a four-time Biju Janata Dal (BJD) MP from Odisha, recalling that in the early 1970s when his father was a Lok Sabha MP, at a time when cars could not be bought by walking into a showroom and one had to wait for a couple of years, an MP, who had the prerogative of getting priority in the queue, would be approached to fast-track the purchase.

OF MPs’ QUOTAS, railway reservation continues, but members say it is now left to the discretion of the railways ministry which goes by availability. In November 2019, two BJP MPs from UP— Upendra Rawat and Kaushal Kishore—asked the ministry whether it was aware that waitlisted tickets of UP and Bihar trains during festivals like Holi, Diwali, Dussehra and Chhath were not being confirmed at the request of MPs and they felt “ashamed” in front of their relatives as a result. They wanted to know the reasons and the rules regarding VIP quotas for MPs. Piyush Goyal, then railway minister, said in his written reply that during peak rush, demand outstrips availability for reserved accommodation on popular trains. He said that though requests received from MPs for their personal travel are complied with, at times it was not feasible to accommodate all other requests.

The die had been cast for the new order. It was time for parliamentarians to move on to face the demands of an aspirational voter. Shashank Mani, 55, among those trying to usher in that change, is chasing his dream of playing the role of “enabler for people to rise”. Interestingly, it was on a train that he began the Jagriti Yatra (awareness journey), a 15-day trip across the country with 500 young leaders to inspire the youth to become entrepreneurs. That was in 2008, 16 years before he entered Par­liament. His LinkedIn profile describes him as a friend and guide to people of Deoria, where he lives in his ancestral village Barpar. His Face­book account says “studied at Jagriti Yatra”.

“Please give me five minutes,” he says, sitting before his laptop engrossed in a webinar with his team and an expert to discuss strategising on increasing GDP over the next 10 years. Wearing a white dhoti, yellow kurta and black Nehru jacket, the B Tech from IIT, Delhi, and an MBA from IMD, Lausanne, looks a true blue Indian politician. The paradox is not off the cuff. It is un­derscored in the ‘Indian modernity’ he espouses and the introduction to his book Middle of a Dia­mond India, in which he writes, “I have lived two lives as an Indian. In one, the long tail of colonial history, mores, linear culture and a metro city-led discourse in English guided me. The second, in the India of small towns and districts, which exposed me to a culture that is circular, complex and vernacular but exciting, emotive and full of possibilities.”

In exactly five minutes, he puts aside his laptop. “There are three main features of a par­liamentarian’s role— meeting people of the constituency, addressing their development related issues and legislation, which is not just related to the constituency but deals with con­cerns at the national level,” he says, speaking of his plans for a Bill on “udmayita (responsible and ethical entrepreneurship)”, on seeking to create a policy framework which allows entre­preneurs to provide enabling infrastructure.

According to Satpathy, MPs are primarily lawmakers and their main job is to legislate. “But the concept of an MP has not changed much in the eyes of most voters. They see them as executives who are responsible for every small thing in the constituency.”

Only 14 Bills moved by MPs, known as private members, have been passed so far in Parliament, of which five originated in Rajya Sabha. These include seven passed in the first Lok Sabha in 1952. The last time a private mem­ber’s Bill was passed in both Houses, becoming an Act, was in 1970 when Anand Narain Mulla, an independent candidate from Lucknow, brought legislation seeking to enlarge the ap­pellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in regard to criminal matters.

It is on Friday afternoons, the most under­played hour of parliamentary proceedings when a majority of MPs are set to travel back home for the weekend from the capital during sessions, leaving the House thinly attended, that private members’ Bills are taken up in both Houses. The press gallery is also sparsely inhabited. Yet some of these Bills have sparked the interest of the government, Opposition and media. In 2015, a Bill on transgender rights, brought by DMK MP Tiruchi Siva was passed in Rajya Sabha, but did not go through in Lok Sabha, where the govern­ment brought a similar Bill, which the member dubbed as “massively diluted”. A Lok Sabha bul­letin issued in November 2023 put the number of private members’ Bills pending in the House at 713. In the 18th Lok Sabha, according to its website data on December 17, 65 such Bills have been introduced in the House. Among them is one by Congress’ Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor that intends to bring down the average age of Lok Sabha by seeking to reserve 10 seats in the House for those below 35, given the country’s demographic profile where the median age is 28. The average age of an MP in the current Lok Sabha is 56, although down from 59 in the previous one, according to PRS Legislative Research data. Only 11 per cent are 40 or younger, 38 per cent are between 41 and 55, while 52 per cent are over 55. Three MPs are 25 years old.

Former Union minister and five-time MP at 50, Anurag Thakur says expecta­tions of constituents from MPs have gone beyond basic amenities to big-ticket projects. “People’s aspirations have changed. They now seek employment, want better infrastructure and highways. From my address as the first speaker mov­ing the debate on the president’s address in Parliament in 2014 to the one this year, the narrative has changed, from focusing on Congress ’ failures to achieve­ments of the Modi government.” Thakur organises khel mahakumbhs, sport activities to engage the youth, and cultural programmes in his constituency, like some other parliamentarians. An MP has to get more innovative, he says.

From the time of long waits to get an LPG cylinder to it being delivered at the door step with just a phone call, it has been a roller-coaster ride, with the govern­ment’s push for infrastructure in the entire ecosystem and piped gas in major cities raising the production and availability of cylinders, putting an end to the practice of parliamentarians having to cope with demands for cylinder coupons. Inside Parliament, questions were often raised about unfulfilled requests by MPs on recommendations for LPG cylinders and railway berth confirmations. In 1995, when PV Narasimha Rao was prime minister, a member had asked if the government proposed to increase the MP quota in respect of LPG connections, to which the then MoS in the petroleum ministry, Satish Sharma, had replied that there was no such proposal in view of restricted availability of LPG and a “huge waiting list”. Over 15 years later, when Congress’ Manmohan Singh was prime minister, a member asked about the number of parliamentarians who made recommendations for LPG connections for their acquaintances. Then MoS RPN Singh, at the time in Congress, had replied that between January 2010 and September 2011, public sector oil marketing companies (OMCs)—Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum—had received 381 recommendations from parliamentarians for release of LPG connections.

THAT WAS ALSO a time when several parliamentarians themselves travelled by train, bringing their own woes to the floor of the House. While increase in railway passenger fares was always a politically sensi­tive issue, long-winded debates on railways gave the members an opportunity to go into details—quality of food, condition of toilets, train robberies in certain sections. In 1997, when Ram Vilas Paswan was Union railway minister in the HD Deve Gowda government, BJP MP Uma Bharti had complained during a debate on the Rail Budget that she noticed instrumental music had replaced bhajans on the Rajdhani Express in the mornings. When she asked the train superintendent, he said the instructions had come from Paswan and that it had to be discontinued because the railways had to be secular in all aspects.

If in 1952 an MP represented an average 3.5 lakh voters, according to Lok Sabha Secretariat data, the figure has now shot up to over 20-25 lakh going by the Census, dividing the population by the num­ber of MPs at 543. Shashank admits that with a growing population and MPLADs funds pegged at ₹5 crore a year for an MP, it is a huge challenge for a single MP to address the concerns of this large a number of constituents. “We need to re­lease their human potential. The next narrative should be sabka prayas (everyone’s efforts), as the prime minister says. Instead of depending on government for everything, people, public and private sectors should come together for an enterprise revolution. The government can be enabler.” What has changed is also data-based politics, right up to the booth level, he says.

In his book, which he says seeks to ener­gise those living in small towns and districts, he writes: “[N]ow that the Middle (neither the rich nor the poor) has gained strength and grav­ity, with a mature democracy beneath us, we must build new institutions that put citizens at the centre of our national and political experi­ence, not just as voters but as builders.” While he is an IITian, five percent of MPs in the 18th Lok Sabha have a doctoral degree, 7 per cent are lawyers and 4 per cent medical practitioners, while agriculture and social work have been the most common professions among them. According to PRS data, MPs are getting more educated, with 78 per cent having completed undergraduate education, against 58 per cent in the first Lok Sabha.

Shashank, who has been with BJP for 26 years, says he has had to undergo a struggle be­fore getting a ticket to fight the Lok Sabha elec­tion. As most young parliamentarians today, he uses social media platforms to showcase his ini­tiatives in his constituency— an employment mela where around 1,400 youth participated and of them 400 were offered jobs by Quess Corp, a business services provider, and a hi-tech bus by ISRO ‘Space on Wheels’ to generate interest among future generations on the Indian space journey—or his day in his village, which starts in the morning with meeting people of Deoria sitting on the floor at the Golambar (cupola) out­side his ancestral house. He has ambitious plans for his constituency. “There is a possibility of a Ground Earth space station in Deoria,” he says.

As I take the last sip of an aromatic tea, I wonder how many parliamentarians are think­ing outside the box. “I am sure there are many,” says Shashank Mani. The House had adjourned for the day that afternoon. He was already pre­paring for the next day, hoping it would run.

Anurag ThakurBJPCongressIndian ParliamentIndia’s Top B-Schools 2025MP MakeoverpoliticsShashank Mani