Madhya Pradesh is in the middle of a dispute after Congress and governing BJP MLAs accused the Mohan Yadav-led administration of failing to respond to their floor questions about land deals and other issues under the Revenue Department.
The Assembly Secretariat wrote to the Principal Secretary of the Revenue Department to request an explanation after the Assembly Speaker was informed following the conclusion of the budget session that the lawmakers were unhappy that their questions had not been addressed. Exclusive information on the missing annexures and the whole list of unresolved questions from the Budget Session has been provided to the news agency.
MLAs in his party as well as lawmakers from the opposition Congress have been criticizing the Revenue Department, which is under Revenue Minister Karan Singh Verma, after a number of their questions—both starred and unstarred—went unanswered. While a starred question requires an oral reply from the minister, allowing follow-ups, unstarred questions are written in nature and doesn’t allow any supplementary questions.
When the Revenue Department claimed that the Assembly library annexures had the answers to their questions, the MLAs were even less convinced. The MLAs were disappointed to learn that, contrary to what the department said, no such information was accessible. For example, the agency said that the information was stored at the library annexure when an MLA inquired about recent land transactions involving the Sahara Group. The irritated lawmaker filed a formal complaint with the Assembly Secretariat after failing to locate any documents.
Narendra Singh Tomar, the Speaker of the Assembly, was made aware of the issue and instructed the Secretariat to request the missing annexures from the Revenue Department.
In a strongly worded letter to Vivek Kumar Porwal, the principal secretary of the Revenue Department, Assembly Principal Secretary Awadhesh Pratap Singh stated that the delay had prompted strong objections from the MLAs and that the Speaker had ordered the missing annexures to be submitted within a week. This trend is not new, though, as earlier Assembly sessions in February, July, and December 2024 also left a number of topics unaddressed.