Context: Recently, the Parliamentary Affairs Minister informed that 99% of the Parliamentary Assurances have been fulfilled, and Online Assurances Monitoring System (OAMS) has helped in ensuring that these assurances get fulfilled.
Relevance of the Topic: Prelims: Key Facts about Online Assurance Monitoring System.
About Online Assurance Monitoring System
- The Online Assurance Monitoring System (OAMS) is a digital platform developed to track the progress of assurances given by various ministries in Parliament.
- Objectives:
- To ensure that assurances made by Ministers in Parliament are systematically tracked, monitored, and fulfilled.
- To eliminate the risk of losing track of commitments for timely fulfilment of assurances.
- To enhance accountability, transparency, and efficiency of Parliament.
- It is a single digital repository where all assurances are recorded. It sends timely alerts to all stakeholders to act on pending assurances, maintaining adherence to the timeline.
- Jointly implemented by: Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs, with secretariats of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha.
About Ministerial Assurances
- During the course of answers to Questions or during debates, various assurances in the form of promises, undertakings or other such forms of expressions are given by Ministers on the floor of the House.
- Such assurances are given due to non-availability of information, at that point of time, to meet the queries or points raised by the Members.
- An assurance given to the Lok/Rajya Sabha is required to be fulfilled within a period of three months from the date of assurance.
- With the approval of the Minister, the Ministry may seek extension of time from the Committee on Government Assurances, Lok/Rajya Sabha for fulfilling the assurance.
- If the Ministry feels that a particular statement/reply does not constitute an assurance or it is not feasible to fulfil the same for any valid reasons, they may write for its deletion/dropping to the Committee on Govt. Assurances.
- The Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs monitors and coordinates the direct implementation of assurances given by the Ministers in Parliament. The functions comprise the following three broad lines of action:
- Culling out of assurances from the debates
- Monitoring the state of fulfilment
- Laying of implementation reports before the Houses.