PILDAT launched the third year score card for the 15th Provincial Assembly of Punjab. The MPAs attending the launch of the score card once again demanded an increased role of the standing committees of the Punjab Assembly as the most crucial reform required to improve the performance of the assembly.
Ahmad Bilal Mehboob, PILDAT executive director, gave an overview of the performance of the provincial assembly based on a score card prepared by using the Toolkit originally developed by Geneva-based Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU), which has parliament and provincial assemblies in Pakistan among its members. He highlighted that performance of the third year does not show much variation from the score card of the first two years.
The Provincial Assembly of the Punjab got an overall score of 43 percent in its evaluation of the performance of the third parliamentary year. This score is identical to the score achieved by the Assembly during the evaluation of its first two completed parliamentary years. The performance of the Punjab Assembly was assessed against the Framework developed by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). The strongest aspect of the assembly’s performance in the third parliamentary year emerged as the Transparency and Accessibility of the Provincial Assembly of the Punjab which got an evaluation score of 51 percent, while the weakest aspect, like the previous two years remains its Involvement in International Policy, with a score of 32 percent. The assembly worked three hours and 18 minutes a day on average in the third year as compared to four hours and three minutes in 2009-2010.
About 21 (55 %) of the committees did not hold a single meeting in the third year, while the chief minister attended 13 (18%) sittings.
The evaluation is based on the valued judgments of an evaluation group consisting of 36 members, including 25 honourable members of the Punjab Assembly representing various political parties, as well as 11 non-MPAs, including journalists, political scientists, senior statesmen, former senior civil servants, lawyers and members of the civil society.
The group was facilitated by PILDAT. This evaluation result indicates that the assembly performance is somewhat stagnant and is not improving. Usually Assemblies do not change much in a short span of a year and this is what was see in this case as well.
