By IANS,
Panaji : Most legislative assemblies and parliament rarely have time for legislative duties, and instead lawmakers waste time by disrupting proceedings, former minister of state for law and chairman of the Goa law commission Ramakant Khalap said Wednesday.
Criticising the functioning of state legislatures and parliament, Khalap said that legislative issues were often neglected by the lawmakers.
“After the question hour and zero hour, there is no work happening. A shortest amount of time is given for legislative work. Most of the time goes in rushing into the well (of the house),” Khalap, a minister in the Deve Gowda-led United Front coalition government, told reporters here.
Justifying his complaint against lawmakers for neglecting their legislative chores, Khalap said that the Goa law commission, which had been appointed after a gap of over 40 years, was a case in point.
“You can judge for yourself. The last law commission was headed by the former speaker Govind Kamat forty years ago,” Khalap said, adding that law commissions, if regularly appointed, helped to weed out inadequacies and anomalies which creep into law over a period of time, other than making laws relevant to the times.
Khalap also said that a similar level of disdain shown by Goan legislators towards their basic duties, meant that various aspects related to law and legislation were in a state of neglect here. He said the state does not even have an inventory of applicable legislation, and one of the first tasks which the commission was undertaking was compilation of an exhaustive list of all the laws applicable in Goa.
The three member Goa law commission, headed by Khalap, has a tenure of one year and has been mandated to “examine existing legislations and to suggest suitable measures requiring changes or modifications with a view to co-ordinating, harmonizing and simplifying legislations to remove any anomalies, ambiguities and inequalities in them”.
The other members of the commission are Mario Pinto Almeida and Cleofato Coutinho.