Former Law Commission of India chairperson Ritu Raj Awasthi appeared on Tuesday before the Joint Parliamentary Committee studying the two bills for simultaneous Lok Sabha and assembly polls as the panel began consulting experts and stakeholders. IAS officer Niten Chandra, the secretary of the high-level Kovind committee, also shared his views with the panel.
Former chief justice of India U U Lalit is also scheduled to appear before the committee during its day-long meeting. E M Sudarsana Natchiappan, a senior advocate and former Congress MP who had headed in 2015 a parliamentary committee that favoured simultaneous polls, will also share his views with the panel. The parliamentary committee’s agenda for the February 25 meeting is briefly listed as “interaction with legal experts”.
The high-level committee headed by former president Ram Nath Kovind was constituted by the Modi government on ‘one nation one election’ (ONOE) and it had in its voluminous report strongly batted for the concept.
Subsequently, the Union Cabinet accepted the committee’s recommendations and the government tabled two bills, including one seeking to amend the Constitution, in Lok Sabha. Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla constituted a 39-member Joint Parliamentary Committee headed by BJP MP and former law minister P P Chaudhary.
The parliamentary committee had so far held two meetings, excluding Tuesday’s, in which prepared broad details of its agenda and the list of stakeholders and experts to be consulted is given.