The bills were the contentious Finance Bill, 2018, and the Appropriation Bill, 2018.
Business News : In 30 minutes on March 13, 2018, Parliament’s lower house, the Lok Sabha, passed without debate funding demands from 99 Indian government ministries and departments, including two bills and 218 amendments.
As many opposition members of Parliament (MPs) protested, Sumitra Mahajan, speaker of the Lok Sabha–controlled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)–used a parliamentary procedure called the “guillotine”, which empowers her to pass grants without discussion.
Among the demands passed:
- Controversial foreign funding to political parties, which will allow them to escape scrutiny with retrospective effect for 42 years.
- Salary hikes for members of parliament, the president, and state governors.
- An Appropriation Bill passed by voice vote on March 14, 2018, which allows govt to draw Rs 80,000 crore from the Consolidated Fund of India (Rs 57 lakh crore), the government’s total revenue.
- A long-term capital gains tax, which has received mixed reactions since it was announced in February. Investors will now have to pay 10% tax on profits from shares sold, even if they have had these shares for more than a year.
The bills were the contentious Finance Bill, 2018, and the Appropriation Bill, 2018.
No bills had passed over the last eight days, with the Opposition protesting the Rs 11,000-crore Punjab National Bank scam, special compensation packages for Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and defacement of the Periyar statue in Tamil Nadu.
On Wednesday afternoon at 12.35pm, speaker Sumitra Mahajan applied the guillotine to pass the budget 2018 in time for the new financial year, which starts on April 1, 2018. At the start of the week, the BJP had issued a three-day whip to its members to be present in the House. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government holds an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha.
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