That sounds like a lot of work, but it’s a little vague. What does a parliamentarian’s workday actually look like? During the course of a legislative session, what do India’s elected leaders actually do ? To answer these questions, Hindustan Times created a calendar to monitor activities on every day of the Monsoon Session in 2017.

Parliament has lots of responsibilities: it must make laws, keep track of government spending, hold the prime minister and his cabinet accountable, and represent the views and issues of the Indian people.

Methodology

To create this calendar, we collected information from the ‘bulletin’ document of both the Houses. Part-I of the ‘bulletin’ contains a brief record of the proceedings of the House at each of its sittings. We categorised each record into five categories: ‘Legislative’, ‘Non-legislative’, ‘Issues/Debates/Q&A’, ‘Adjourned due to interruption’ and ‘Break’.

Anything related to bills—whether it was passed, introduced or withdrawn—was classified under ‘Legislative’. The ‘Question and Answer’ session, which is slotted for an hour before lunch in both houses was clubbed with debates and discussions under one category called ‘Issues/Debates/Q&A’. Then we have ‘non-legislative’, which captures administrative work and routine stuff like the presentation of committee reports. ‘Break’ is mostly the lunch break or when the house adjourns for another activity. And last, ‘Adjourned due to interruption’ included the times when the House was adjourned by the Speaker due to interruptions.