The 2022 Assembly elections are less than a month away, with the first phase of voting set to be held in Uttar Pradesh on 10 February, kicking off a seven-phase polling in the state.
Other states to go to polls are - Goa, Manipur, Punjab, and Uttarakhand.
Eligible voters of these states will exercise their democratic right to vote, elect a representative from their constituency, and send them to the Legislative Assembly, just as they did five years ago.
Five years ago, the people elected their MLAs, sent them to raise issues on their behalf in the Assembly, and to take their problems to the elected government. But how successfully have they done that? How many questions did they raise in the Assembly?
In UP, the record of elected representatives is pretty dismal, with 174 members of the Assembly not raising even a single question.
Not a Single Question Asked
In an Assembly of 403 members, there are 174 MLAs elected in 2017 who did not ask a single question in five years. That is 43% of the members. The figure might seem shocking, but it’s true.
According to a report by PRS India, 147 out of these 174 MLAs are from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 19 are from the Samajwadi Party (SP), three are from Apna Dal and two from the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
There are two independent MLAs as well who did not ask a single question in five years.
Meanwhile, there are 28 MLAs who asked only one question in 5 years.
There are only 19 MLAs who asked more than 100 questions in 5 years. Of those, eight are from the BJP, six from the SP, two from the Apna Dal, and one each from the BSP and the Congress.
Top 10 MLAs Who Asked Most Questions
In the top 10 who asked most questions in the UP Assembly, the SP has the maximum number of MLAs – four. Whereas the BJP has three, Apna Dal has two and the BSP has one.
The first number in the top 10 is of BJP MLA Sanjay Pratap Jaiswal who asked 352 questions.
On the second position is SP MLA Narendra Singh Verma who asked 250 questions.
The third number is of BSP MLA Sukhdev Rajbhar who asked 239 questions, followed by SP MLA Faim Irfan who asked 216 questions. At the fifth position is SP MLA Sanjay Sarg who asked 215 questions.
BJP's Manish Asija asked 177 questions in 5 years, while Awasthi Bala Prasad asked 158 questions.
Apna Dal MLA Jamuna Prasad Saroj asked 154 questions and MLA RK Verma asked 154 questions.
At the number 10 is Prashant Yadav of the SP who asked 147 questions.
13 MLAs With 100% Attendance in the Assembly
In the last five years, there were 13 MLAs who maintained 100 percent attendance.
All these MLAs are from the BJP. Their names are:
Kailash Singh Rajput
Purushottam Khandelwal
Yuvraj Singh
Brijesh Kumar
Shashank Verma
Anand Swaroop Shukla
Sharad Kumar Awasthi
Dal Bahadur
Gyan Tiwari
Ram Pratap alias Shashikant Verma
Shashank Trivedi
Ram Naresh Rawat
Veer Vikram Singh
For 50 percent attendance or less, the number of MLAs is 22. In this list, the BJP has 12, the SP has six, and the BSP has two. There are two Independents and one Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) MLA in the list of legislators with more than 50% attendance.
MLAs With the Least Attendance
Independent MLA Raghuraj Pratap Singh, SP MLA Pinky Singh Yadav, Independent MLA Amanmani Tripathi, BJP's Arun Kumar Yadav, Praveen Kumar Singh, Ajay Pratap Singh, RLD's Sahendra Singh Ramala, BSP's Mukhtar Ansari, and SP's Yasar Shah are the MLAs with the least attendance in the Assembly in the last five years.
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