PANAJI
Be it circumstances, dirty politics or sheer luck, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant has had quite an easy run with the accountability of his administration, now nearly six years old, in the Goa Legislative Assembly.
A brute majority engineered through brazen and wholesale defections, both in the current as well as the previous term of the Assembly, is clearly the most contributing factor to the government sailing through, leaving aside the few times witty and concerted efforts by the Opposition have managed to put the govt momentarily on the mat.
But there is one weapon, which even hopeless numbers cannot dent, that the Opposition has failed to utilize to keep a check and extract legislative accountability from the government -- statutory House Committees.
There are twelve committees that the House constitutes which meet aside of the Assembly Sessions but three of them -- Public Accounts Committee, Public Undertakings Committee and Estimates Committee -- are usually by convention headed by Opposition MLAs and crucial for holding the government of the day to account.
Unfortunately, most of these House Committees have failed to live up to their potential and have remained largely dysfunctional, thus letting the Sawant-led administration off the hook. These three committees PAC, PUC and the (EC) which scrutinize and assess the fiscal business of the government (executive) have hardly even met over the nearly three years of the current Assembly's tenure.
The PAC, which is headed by the Congress' Quepem MLA Altone D'Costa, has met only once in September 2024. Apart from D'Costa who heads it, the PAC is comprised of Ganesh Gaonkar, Ulhas Tuenkar, Jennifer Monserrate and Kedar Naik (all from BJP) besides two more MLAs from the Opposition -- Cruz Silva of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Viresh Borkar of the Revolutionary Goans Party (RGP) -- the balance clearly lopsided in favour of the ruling dispensation.
The PAC is responsible to examine and hold accountable the fiscal functioning of the State administration and also virtually sets the agenda for the crucial audit and observations of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG).
In the previous House (2017-22), this crucial committee had met seven times in 2017, nine times in 2018, six times in 2019 and thrice and once in the COVID-19-hit years of 2020 and 2021.
Ditto has been the case of the PUC, which is headed by Leader of the Opposition, Yuri Alemao. This committee also scrutinizes the fiscal position and functioning of State-owned corporations and autonomous bodies but has met only twice in 2024 -- in January and in September. It has a better record, however, of having met four times in 2022, holding two meetings each in June and September.
The Alemao-headed PUC also has as members Pravin Arlekar, Premendra Shet, Ulhas Tuenkar, Jit Arolkar, Cruz Silva and Viresh Borkar, the balance tied at 3-3 between the Opposition and the government.
During the tenure of the previous Assembly, the PUC had met six times in 2017, eight times in 2018, thrice in 2019 and as many as eight and ten times in the COVID-19-hit years of 2020 and 2021, respectively.
Yuri-Altone jumble-up, tenure row
The PAC (Public Accounts Committee) is undoubtedly the most powerful of all House Committees, having jurisdiction to scrutinize every aspect of government functioning.
Its chairmanship is a mantle usually donned by the Leader of Opposition and its importance can be gauged from the episode in 2010-12 when the late Manohar Parrikar led it in the tenure of Digambar Kamat. His report, compiled after an enquiry into the alleged multi-crore mining scam virtually parallel to the Supreme Court-appointed Justice Shah Commission generated a lot of heat and was controversially dumped by then Speaker Pratapsing Rane on technicalities. It virtually set the tone for the 2012 assembly elections which saw the Parrikar-led BJP win a majority on its own.
Currently, call it an inadvertent jumble-up or a mistake by design, the PAC is headed by Altone D'Costa and not the Leader of Opposition, Yuri Alemao. Instead, Alemao was named chairman of the PUC (Public Undertakings Committee) which is of a much lesser significance as its jurisdiction extends only to public undertakings (corporations and autonomous bodies) and not all government departments.
Now, there is yet another spoke in the functioning of these two committees with questions raised over their tenures having ended. In fact, reports presented by Alemao of the PUC were rejected by the House on Friday after Law Minister Aleixo Sequeira raised the issue that the committee's tenure had ended last year.
Other committees
Another committee which is charged with reviewing the State government's fiscal prudence and budgetary compliances -- the Estimates Committee -- also suffers from the same dysfunctional syndrome.
The Committee is headed by fromer chief minister Digambar Kamat and has met just twice this year in August and September. Apart from Kamat, it comprises four more MLAs from the ruling side -- Ulhas Tuenkar, Michael Lobo, Premendra Shet and Jit Arolkar -- and two from the Opposition in Venzy Viegas of AAP and Carlos Alvares-Ferreira of Congress.
Several other committees including the Special House Committee on the vexed Mhadei issue headed by WRD Minister Subhash Shirodkar have also met just once or twice. In fact, the Shirodkar-led House Committee on Mhadei met on January 8 this year only for the second time after more than a year had elapsed since it met for the first time in 2023.
