CHENNAI: The MLAs strolling along corridors of the assembly hall, carrying gift wrapped packages or relishing sumptuous biryani for lunch during the month-long budget session may be a thing of the past.
Call it austerity, the first-time chief minister M K Stalin seems to have issued stern instructions to department heads and ministers to do away with the practice. The MLAs will have to either make their own arrangements for meals or rely on the assembly pantry.
Beyond the fiery debates and walkouts, the budget session of the assembly had been famous for the lunches provided by each department for MLAs, ministers and staff, police, the Secretariat staff and journalists, when their demand for grants was taken up during the month-long session. It has been the practice for more than a decade, when members too, get high-cost gifts from the minister, who moves the demand for grants for his department. “The Assembly is the highest forum for law making and intellectual debates and known for its simplicity. But these gifts and sumptuous meals tend to lower its dignity and decorum,” said a senior bureaucrat. The demands will be taken up for debate between August 23 and September 21.
Each department would have spent nearly Rs three lakh a day to feed more than 1,000 people, and there were occasions when MLAs were served breakfast at the Chepauk hostel. There are no budgetary provisions for the lunch served during the budget debate, but the departments intended to make the members happy with a lavish spread of vegetarian and nonvegetarian dishes from top restaurants and the expenses were brought under different account heads, sources said. The opposition MLAs preferred meals in their party offices at the Secretariat complex with arrangements of their own.
From high-cost suitcases to trolley bags, watches to electronic goods, handicraft items to ornamental fishes and fish boxes, Aavin products to spices and forest products, milletbased products to traditional rice varieties, the MLAs were pampered by the ministers. “The members would sign the registers kept in the library and get the gifts from the departmental staff,” said a former MLA. The sources said the cost of lunch and gifts shot up after the demise of former chief minister J Jayalalithaa and when ministers enjoyed clout in the day-to-day affairs of the departments.
