The Constitution of India does not permit its financial processes to be compressed into 12 minutes. These are not procedural complaints. They are constitutional injuries
On the afternoon of March 16, 2026, the Goa Legislative Assembly completed the most important constitutional business of its annual calendar — the passage of the State Budget for 2026-27 — in exactly twelve minutes. Seventy-nine demands for grants were passed without a single minute of discussion. The Goa Appropriation (No 3) Bill, 2026, authorising the expenditure of Rs 30,194 crores of public money, was introduced, considered, and passed between 2.42 pm and 2.59 pm. Seventeen minutes. The justification offered was the Model Code of Conduct (MCC), announced by the Election Commission on March 15, for a bypoll in the Ponda constituency.
On this basis, the government announced that ministers could not give assurances during budget discussions without violating the MCC, and that the only responsible course was to curtail the session, originally scheduled to run until March 27, and pass the full budget immediately. Eleven days of scheduled legislative business were extinguished overnight. The argument does not survive scrutiny. In the same period, the legislative assemblies of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, and Tripura — all states where bypolls had been announced, and the MCC was in force — continued their assembly sessions without interruption.
No government in those states discovered that a bypoll in one constituency disabled the legislature from transacting financial business. No speaker in those states directed that the budget be rushed through in an afternoon. The constitutional principle that the legislature is supreme over any executive code of conduct, a principle that the Speaker of the Goa Assembly himself correctly articulated on the morning of March 16 before inexplicably failing to act on it, was applied in every other state without difficulty. Goa alone found it insurmountable. The way the afternoon session was conducted compounds the constitutional injury. When the House resumed after lunch at 2.30 pm, the very first item of business — before a single demand for grants was moved, before the Chief Minister had said a word about the budget — was a motion to suspend Rule 259 of the Rules of Procedure, the rule that governs the procedure for voting on demands for grants. The suspension was moved, voted upon, and carried in one minute.
At 2.31 pm, the demands began. The Opposition, which had been directed to be escorted out by marshals at 12.15 pm during the morning pandemonium, was not present on the floor of the House for the passage of a Money Bill that will govern the expenditure of over thirty thousand crores of public money. There is a further matter: the public record has now been established, and no official explanation has been provided.
The Speaker’s Valedictory Remarks, an official document of the House, describes in the past tense the passage of 79 demands for grants and the Goa Appropriation Bill as accomplished facts. That document was the Speaker’s prepared address, kept ready on his table at 2.30 pm and delivered at 3 pm. The Appropriation Bill was passed at 2.59 pm. The official Bulletin of the House — Bulletin Part I No 95 — confirms both timestamps. A valedictory address summarising the achievements of a session is by its nature prepared after the session’s business is concluded.
The preparation, printing, and physical placement of such a document on the Speaker’s table at 2.30 pm, describing events that concluded at 2.59 pm, raises questions about the sequence of events that no one in authority has seen fit to answer. When was the instruction to prepare that document given? When was paragraph 6, describing the passage of the Appropriation Bill, typed? The answers to these questions would tell the people of Goa whether what happened on 16 March was a legislative process or a managed performance. And then came the information that was not available on March 16, but that retrospective examination makes it impossible to ignore.
The Chief Minister, who led the government’s management of that day’s proceedings with evident urgency, was subsequently admitted to a hospital in Pune. He had not been well. Whether that circumstance explains the urgency of March 16 is a question that the government, the ruling party, the Speaker, and the Cabinet have chosen not to answer.
They have also chosen not to answer why the MCC that stopped Goa’s legislature in its tracks produced no such paralysis in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, or Tripura. Twenty-one private member bills lapsed without introduction. And the official record of all of this, Bulletin Part I No 95, signed and dated March 16, 2026, was uploaded to the Assembly website four days later — on March 20. The Constitution of India does not permit its financial processes to be compressed into 12 minutes in the name of an election code that applies to a single constituency. It does not permit elected members to be removed from the house and then have a Money Bill passed in their absence. It does not permit the outcome of a legislative session to be described in a prepared document before the session has concluded. These are not procedural complaints. They are constitutional injuries. And the people of Goa are entitled to a full accounting of how they were inflicted, by whom, and why.
(Dr Nandkumar M Kamat, who has a doctorate in microbiology, is a scientist and a science writer)
