Offbeat: Vidhan Sabha MLAs silent after PM’s advice, tablets still talk of the town

The fear of digitisation taking over oration of the leaders

Updated: Sep 16th, 2023

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The eventful monsoon session of Gujarat Vidhan Sabha saw another day where tablets took over the originality, and the answers to important questions led nowhere.

Questions, however, came mostly from the opposition, as the BJP camp was mostly silent. Apparently, reports suggest that PM Modi, when he last attended a meal with the MLAs, had addressed the ‘talkative’ and ‘questioning’ MLAs from his party in public.

This, now has led to MLAs mostly keeping mum and have averted them from asking questions. While previously, it seemed that even BJP MLAs had an abundance of questions for their own government, now many of them are just silent observers. 

On the other hand, when it came to speaking up, MLAs were too reliant on technology, a completely different scenario from two days ago!

Digitisation taking over the art of oration?

Where earlier, the concern was to get MLAs familiar with the tablets given to them under e-Vidhan Sabha, the tables have turned in a different way now.

The art of oration in the assembly was seen fading away as the MLAs did not use their public speaking skills at all, rather just reading their speech aloud from the tablets, as it were.

The situation led to a point where the speaker of the assembly had to tell the MLAs to use the tablet only to refer to the pointers, and not have their whole speech read word-by-word from the screen!

Attention lost, try again!

While asking a sub-question in the assembly, Congress MLA Vimal Chudasama was asked to repeat his question by minister Kunvarji Halpati.

At this point, reportedly, the speaker had to intervene, telling the latter to pay attention while the questions were directly asked to him.

Interestingly enough, Halpati did not answer the question even after the question was repeated, and he agreed to send a written answer afterwards.

Gujarat, vibrant for industries

According to reports, the opposition was vocal about the government’s soft spot for the industries. Allegations were made about industries not recruiting enough local workforce and breaking the rules. 

Reportedly, the opposition also cornered the government on the issue of unemployment among the educated, when a number of MOUs and agreements were signed under ‘vibrant’ deals.

Apart from this, questions were also raised about the government not reducing the stamp duty (tax imposed on the sale/transfer of property). However, there were no further questions on that, only after one answer from the ruling party.

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