What do the Committees of Parliament do?

A defining feature of how a modern legislature actually works is the appointment of committees for various legislative purposes. Committees are not a minor add-on to the law-making process — they play a vital role both in law-making itself and in the day-to-day business of the House. Parliament meets only during limited sessions, which means it has very little time at its disposal for the volume of work in front of it. Drafting a law, for instance, calls for detailed, in-depth study of the issue at hand, requiring far more time and attention than a full sitting of the House can realistically give it. The same is true of several other important functions — studying the demands for grants made by different ministries, examining the expenditure incurred by various departments, and looking into cases of corruption, among others.

Since 1983, India has built up a system of parliamentary standing committees to handle exactly this kind of detailed work. There are now more than twenty departmentally-related standing committees, each supervising the work of a particular set of government departments — their budgets, their expenditure, and the bills that come before the House relating to that department. Alongside these standing committees, Joint Parliamentary Committees (JPCs) have also come to occupy an important place. A JPC can be set up either to examine a particular bill in detail or to investigate financial irregularities, and its members are drawn from both Houses of Parliament. …