The official record of debates in India's Parliament

Who prepares the record

In the Lok Sabha, Rule 379 provides that the Secretary-General shall cause a full report of the proceedings of the House to be prepared and published ¹. Rule 382 lets the Speaker authorise printing and publication, and the rule book itself is published under Rule 382 ¹.

The Rajya Sabha, or Council of States, has a parallel rule. Under Rule 260 the Secretary-General shall cause a full report of the proceedings of the Council at each of its meetings to be prepared and, as soon as practicable, published ². The Rajya Sabha publishes the text of its debates date-wise on its official debates page ⁴.

Expunged words

Both Houses let the presiding officer remove words from the record after they are spoken. Lok Sabha Rule 380 allows the Speaker, if of the opinion that words used in debate are defamatory or indecent or unparliamentary or undignified, to order in the Speaker's discretion that they be expunged ¹. Rajya Sabha Rule 261 gives the Chairman the same power over the proceedings of the Council ².

The removal is visible. Under Lok Sabha Rule 381 and Rajya Sabha Rule 262, the expunged portion is marked by asterisks and a footnote is inserted that reads Expunged as ordered by the Chair ^1,2. A reader who sees this footnote knows that words were spoken at that point and that the official record no longer carries them.

Secret sittings

Chapter XXV of the Lok Sabha rules, Rules 248 to 252, covers secret sittings of the House ¹. A secret sitting is held on a request made by the Leader of the House ¹. Under Rule 249 the Speaker may cause a report of the proceedings to be issued in such manner as the Speaker thinks fit, and no other person present may keep a note or record of the proceedings or issue any report of them ¹.

Secrecy can end. When the need for secrecy has ceased and subject to the Speaker's consent, the Leader of the House or an authorised member may move that the proceedings of a secret sitting no longer be treated as secret ¹.

The 1977 law on press reports

The Parliamentary Proceedings (Protection of Publication) Act, 1977 is Act No. 15 of 1977, dated 18 April 1977, and is deemed to have come into force on 25 March 1977 ³. Section 3(1) provides that no person is liable to civil or criminal proceedings in any court for publishing in a newspaper a substantially true report of any proceedings of either House. The exception is where the publication is proved to have been made with malice ³.

Section 3(2) states that this does not protect publication of any matter that is not for the public good ³. Section 4 applies the Act to reports broadcast by wireless telegraphy from a broadcasting station within its territorial extent ³. A note to the Act records that a notification dated 30 October 2019 applied it to the Union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh ³.

• Newspaper is defined to include a news agency supplying material for publication in a newspaper ³.
• The test is a substantially true report, not a word-for-word copy ³.
• Protection falls away if malice is proved ³.

Checking an Indian parliamentary quote

Start with the date-wise text of debates published by the relevant House ⁴. If the passage shows asterisks and the footnote Expunged as ordered by the Chair, the words were removed under the expunction rules ^1,2. A quote that circulates from a live broadcast may include words that the official record no longer contains, and a report of expunged words is a different matter from a report of the official text.

For proceedings of a secret sitting, the only report is the one the Speaker causes to be issued ¹. A claimed quote from such a sitting can only be matched against a public verbatim record if the House has released one.

Expect light editing in any parliamentary report. The Parliament of South Africa, for example, describes its Hansard as substantially verbatim, with repetitions and redundancies omitted and obvious mistakes corrected ⁵.