Parliamentary committees are indispensable to the legislative process. It provides for the opportunity for cross-pollination between the two chambers of the Parliament. Discuss. (Answer in 350 words)

- Parliamentary committees are indispensable to the legislative process. It provides for the opportunity for cross-pollination between the two chambers of the Parliament. Discuss. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
Committees are where Parliament actually legislates. With the House sitting barely sixty days a year and floor time consumed by disruption, detailed scrutiny survives only in the committee room, and there the two chambers work as a single body.

Body

1. The architecture: Three financial committees, Public Accounts from 1921, Estimates from 1950 and Public Undertakings from 1964; twenty-four Department-Related Standing Committees since 1993; and ad hoc Select and Joint Committees, including the Joint Parliamentary Committees on Bofors, the securities scam, 2G and data protection.
2. Bicameral composition is built in: Each standing committee has thirty-one members, twenty-one from the Lok Sabha and ten from the Rajya Sabha, while the Public Accounts Committee has fifteen and seven. Sixteen committees are serviced by the Lok Sabha Secretariat and eight by the Rajya Sabha.
3. Why that matters: Money Bills exclude the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha's numbers decide the floor, but in committee the Council of States contributes its longer tenure, its nominated expertise and its federal voice on equal terms.
4. Deliberation without the whip: Proceedings are closed and unreported, the party whip does not operate and the Tenth Schedule does not bite. Members cross-examine secretaries, summon experts and take evidence from stakeholders, none of which the floor permits.
5. Financial control: Demands for Grants are guillotined in the House but examined line by line in committee, and the Public Accounts Committee gives the Comptroller and Auditor General's reports their only political consequence.
6. The record is nonetheless deteriorating: Referral of Bills fell from about seventy per cent in the fifteenth Lok Sabha to roughly a sixth in the seventeenth. Reports bind no one, are rarely debated, and chairpersons serve a single year. Attendance is poor and research support minimal beside the United States Congress.

Conclusion
Committees are indispensable precisely because they supply what the plenary has lost: time, expertise and cross-chamber deliberation. Making referral of Bills the default rule, lengthening tenures and providing professional research staff would restore to legislation what disruption has taken from the floor.