Live screens, shifts in House Covid-19 plan

NEW DELHI: Giant screens, engineers from the National Informatics Centre (NIC) on call, provisions for possible latency — these are among the issues Rajya Sabha chairman Venkaiah Naidu and Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and their teams are wrestling with as they finalise plans to hold sittings of the Lok Sabha across both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha chambers to meet the requirement of social distancing made necessary by Covid-19 pandemic.

The plan is to stagger timings of the two Houses so that they never sit simultaneously, and hold sittings of each across both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. The exact timings of each House have not been finalised yet. HT learns that the government is likely to call the session after August 15.

Also part of the plan are fibreglass or plexiglass sheets between seats, reduced workforce across the Parliament complex, working over weekends to ensure the Houses can sit for enough time, inputs from multiple ministries, teething technical troubles and countless queries— all part of an ongoing, mammoth exercise to hold Indian Parliament’s monsoon session in these uncertain times.

With 770 seats across the two Houses, India has the world’s fourth-largest Parliament by number of lawmakers after the UK, Italy and France. Holding a session is such a big affair that Naidu and Birla have already met six times to strategise.

Both are familiar with every small detail of Parliament complex, but they undertook field visits to physically check how MPS could sit across different areas.

The ministries of home affairs, health, urban development, and civil aviation and CPWD were consulted in the last few weeks, a top functionary added, as aspects related to logistics, security, and health were worked out.

The Lok Sabha MPS will sit in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha chambers, the galleries of both houses, and the Central hall. Similarly, the Upper House MPS will be divided between the two Houses and the galleries.

The Lok Sabha has 529 members. The Rajya Sabha has 242.

The Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha chambers can accommodate 60 and 158 lawmakers respectively if strict social distancing norms are followed. The galleries of the Upper House (barring the press gallery) can seat another 67 MPS. The Lok Sabha galleries can seat 132. That works out to a total of 417 spots, enough to seat the Rajya Sabha members.