Can We Attend Parliament Online? Ask MPs At IT Panel Meet

New Delhi: The government’s contact-tracing Aarogya Setu mobile application (app), the recent ban on 59 Chinese apps, and the possibility of MPs attending the upcoming monsoon session of Parliament, likely to begin after August 15, online because of the pandemic.

These were among the questions that MPs asked in the first meeting of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information and Technology on Tuesday after the outbreak of coronavirus in the country. The meeting was chaired by Congress Member of Parliament (MP) Shashi Tharoor, reported Hindustan Times (HT).

Around eight members of Parliament, including Tharoor, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Tejaswi Surya, Rajyavardhan Rathore, Nishikant Dubey, Sanjay Seth, and Anil Aggarwal were present at the meeting, which was also attended by officials from the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the report said.

The panel has 29 members, including 21 and eight from the Lok Sabha (LS) and the Rajya Sabha (RS), respectively.

Later, Thiruvananthapuram MP Tharoor put out a tweet about the meeting.

To the question of some MPs whether they could virtually attend the monsoon session of Parliament, a MeitY official on the condition of anonymity said, “Our response was simple, we can do it tomorrow.” “We just need the go-ahead to conduct it. Parliament, in any case, is telecast live so it is not much of an issue,” reported HT.

However, the standing committee members need to meet in person, as these are confidential matters, said the official was quoted as saying by HT.

Derek O’Brien, Trinamool Congress’s RS MP and a member of the panel, also raised the issue of virtual presence during Tuesday’s meeting, the report added.