'Right To Disconnect' Bill's Fate Sealed Before Reaching Floor
By Gajanan Khergamker
It is almost poetic that at a time when India’s workforce feels more tethered to devices than ever before, Supriya Sule has chosen to place before Parliament a private member’s bill asserting something as fundamental as the right to disconnect. The very act of proposing such legislation gestures at a deeper malaise in the legislative culture, for every seasoned observer knows that the fate of the bill is sealed long before it reaches the floor. It will be introduced with earnest intent.
It will be admitted into the record. It will be debated politely in the rare event it is taken up on a Friday afternoon. It will then recede into the swelling archive of private members’ bills that have, for more than fifty years, failed to progress beyond symbolism. In the story of Sule’s well-timed proposal lies the tragedy and contradiction of a parliamentary tradition that has quietly hollowed out one of the most vital channels available to individual lawmakers in a functioning democracy.
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| Image for representational purpose only |
There was a time when the private member’s bill served as a legitimate instrument of reform. It was a vehicle through which conscientious parliamentarians without ministerial portfolios could force uncomfortable conversations. It was a constitutional reminder that legislative initiative did not belong exclusively to the executive.
Between 1952 and 1970, Parliament passed fourteen private members’ bills. These laws enlarged fundamental rights, expanded judicial review, protected institutions for women and children and reshaped facets of criminal and marriage law. Their success followed from a legislative ethos that valued the merit of an idea over the identity of its mover.
That ethos has long since been eclipsed by a political culture in which executive dominance has become absolute. Governments, regardless of party, guard legislative turf with an iron instinct. The introduction of private members’ bills is tolerated as harmless theatre provided they remain firmly within the symbolic realm. These bills are debated within tightly controlled slivers of parliamentary time. Their consideration is always secondary to the government’s legislative priorities. Any proposal, however persuasive on its merits, is dismissed as either duplicative, inconvenient or fiscally undesirable. When the treasury benches express even the mildest opposition, the bill is functionally finished. No ruling party in the last five decades has allowed a private member’s bill to slip through on the strength of persuasion alone.
This is not merely an accident of majoritarian politics. It reflects a structural shift in the way Parliament understands its own purpose. Legislative initiative has moved decisively from the collective to the executive. The government proposes and the government disposes. Parliament debates within boundaries quietly drawn around it. Individual initiative is permitted as spectacle rather than substance. Private members’ bills, once catalysts for debate, have become notifications of earnest concern. They signal issues that the government must someday address, though rarely in the form proposed. Their value lies not in their chance of passage but in their ability to place new ideas on the national table.
Sule’s bill represents precisely this dynamic. The right to disconnect is not an indulgence. It is a serious response to a profound shift in work culture. The line between professional obligation and personal existence has dissolved in a haze of urgent messages and late-night calls. The mental health implications are well documented. The economic cost of burnout is no longer invisible. Countries across Europe have recognised this and legislated accordingly.
India’s digital economy is growing rapidly and with it the burdens on workers who find themselves permanently on call. The issue is not frivolous nor is it partisan. It affects every class of salaried employee from the most junior associate to senior management. By placing this right on the legislative agenda, Sule forces Parliament to confront a question that walks silently through every modern workplace. When does work end and life begin.
The political irony is unmistakable. Everyone recognises the urgency of the issue yet no one expects the bill to pass. The parliamentary ritual will honour its intent while expertly avoiding its adoption. The government will acknowledge the concern while reminding the House that labour law reform must be holistic and that piecemeal intervention through private members’ bills is inappropriate. Opposition members will praise Sule’s initiative while knowing full well that the arithmetic of the House does not favour outcomes outside the executive’s control. In the end, the bill will serve its true purpose. It will ignite conversation within industries, prompt editorials on burnout, spur debates on labour rights and push the government to formally consider a future response. For a private member’s bill in contemporary India, this is already a remarkable achievement.
Yet beneath this procedural inevitability lies a democratic discomfort. When individual lawmakers are denied the possibility of steering legislation, even in exceptional cases, Parliament forfeits part of its deliberative soul. The executive becomes the sole architect of lawmaking. The House becomes a theatre of endorsements rather than ideas. Private members’ bills become postcards addressed to a government that may or may not choose to read them. Sule’s bill, for all its relevance, becomes one more missive in this long and unacknowledged tradition.
The question that lingers is not whether this bill will pass. It is why Parliament appears content with a system that rewards conformity over initiative. A vibrant legislature thrives on the friction of competing visions. It recognises the vitality of ideas that originate outside the executive. It acknowledges that democracy breathes more fully when every member can leave an imprint on the law of the land. Until this culture of legislative openness returns, private members’ bills will continue to live and die as artefacts of parliamentary aspiration.
And each time an MP like Supriya Sule introduces a bill that speaks directly to the anxieties of a modern nation, the gap between Parliament’s procedural form and its democratic promise becomes just a little harder to ignore.
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