In Focus


Parliamentarians often feel starved of research assistance and analytical work for healthy and meaningful debates affecting common people. Given their political and other duties, they sometimes feel constrained in terms of time to read lengthy analysis. Further, many issues under discussion are of such technical nature as to deter MPs from making adequate analysis. Over the years, CUTS has been approached by various on MPs to provide critical inputs on various relevant socio-economic policy issues.

On the Competition Act

  • Sanjay Paswan, on reading CUTS’ Bill Blow-up on the Competition Bill of India, 2001, notes .when I started reading this six-page excellent document, I could not stop till I finished…? He recalls having got in touch with the head office of CUTS at Jaipur requesting for more information on the subject that was provided and used by him and other MPs during the debate in the Parliament.
  • Rahul Bajaj approached CUTS in September 2007 for the Bill Blow-up on the Competition (Amendment) Bill, 2006: What needs to done? A detailed response was sent covering the amendments, particularly those relating to overlap with intellectual property rights (IPRs) and sector regulators, constitution of selection committee and its procedures and independence and autonomy of the Commission.
  • Similarly, VP Singh, MP (BJP) approached CUTS in 2007 when the Competition Amendment Bill, 2006 was being debated in the Parliament. A set of documents was sent to him to facilitate his interventions in the debate.

Other Issues

  • In the year 2002, the then Minister of Information Technology & Communications, decided to take help from CUTS on policy matters. Among others, Secretary General of CUTS suggested that real estate in the custody of the Postal Department should be made use of. This helped the Minister in initiating a policy and he later acknowledged that was one of many instances when my interaction with CUTS resulted in concrete outcomes?.
  • On another occasion in the recent past, Nitin Desai, former Under Secretary General, UN was delivering a lecture on climate change and Suresh Prabhu was chairing the meeting. Suresh Prabhu requested Pradeep S Mehta to organise a PARFORE meeting on climate change, which CUTS would organise shortly.