Young Parliamentarians

Aparajita Bharti loves this assignment. Every day, she visits New Delhi's South Avenue office-cum-home of NK Singh, a Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament (MP). She helps him with sourcing statistics and information, so that he can ask informed questions in the upper house of Parliament. Currently, she is also helping him write a book called, Parliamentary Oversight.

She is not an expert in policy-making or parliamentary affairs, but a fresh graduate in business studies from the College of Business Studies, University of Delhi.

Bharti is one of the 15 legislative assistants (LAs) who give intellectual support to Indian MPs to help them carry out their legislative duties.

Assistant to an MP

Besides the stipend of R12,000 per month that she gets, Bharti thrilled to see the MP raise a question that she has framed for him for the monsoon session of Parliament, which ended on August 31. "You get a great feeling when you realise that you are adding value to the functioning of Parliament," says Bharti.

Such satisfaction is unparalleled, agrees Rebecca Alison George. She says she was happy to see Moinul Hassan, an MP she is assisting, raise a question in the Rajya Sabha, which was addressed to Pranab Mukherjee, the Finance Minister of India.

To become an LA, you only need to be a graduate in any stream - commerce, science, humanities or social sciences. LAs hail from diverse backgrounds such as science, law, economics, and history. Among the present group of LAs, there is an economics graduate who wanted to make the best use of a gap year before his MBA while there is Koyel Lahiri, an aspiring trade union expert who wanted to watch policy formulation from close quarters. Lahiri got this chance at BJP spokesman Prakash Javadekar's office.

And they are all here with different objectives. Bharati Sekar, a law graduate from the Gujarat National Law University, says, "I wish to study public policy after a few years as preparation to work in a thinktank later," she says. Bharati aims to become a politician in the future and currently works with Ratna Bai, a Rajya Sabha MP from Andhra Pradesh.

On the other hand, Sonamika Bishnoi, an assistant to Congress MP Sanjay Nirupam, took up this assignment merely to explore new things.