PRS Legislative Research

The research shop the Home Ministry would not let foreigners fund

PRS Legislative Research is the private, non-profit institute that briefs India’s Members of Parliament on legislation — and the government once decided that foreigners should not be allowed to pay for that work. The Home Ministry twice denied PRS permission to receive foreign funds, in 2012, after what a senior official described as “an elaborate investigation into the functioning of the organisation.”

The official reason was suspicion that foreign funding for a research body working with MPs could lead to “lobbying.” PRS co-founder and president M. R. Madhavan confirmed the ban but said the government gave no substantive reason: “We just got a terse one-line letter from some undersecretary in the ministry that the request had been denied in ‘public interest’.” The then minister of state for home, Mullappally Ramachandran, was blunter: “It is not desirable that our legislators accept foreign support channeled through an NGO for their parliamentary research assistance.”

The ministry’s own officials stressed there were no specific allegations against PRS — “There are no specific allegations against PRS. It is just that the work that PRS does enters the gray area since they work with politicians,” one told the Economic Times. The unease centered on access: “PRS has access to draft bills even before they are ready to be put out in public domain. It not only helps MPs drafting these Bills but also helps them research questions they raise in Parliament. Its members also help MPs prepare for debates.”

The funding fight had real stakes. While incubated inside the Centre for Policy Research, PRS had received foreign funding from the Ford Foundation and Google; once independent, it had lined up promises of a million dollars from the Omidyar Network, $550,000 from the Ford Foundation and $300,000 from Canada’s IDRC. After the refusal — which took 11 months against a normal three-month timeline, with reconsideration also rejected — PRS turned entirely to domestic backers, including Ajay Piramal, India Value Fund Advisors, the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation, Mahindra & Mahindra, the Pirojsha Godrej Foundation, Rohini Nilekani and Tata Sons.

What PRS actually does

PRS was set up in September 2005, incubated in the Centre for Policy Research, with the stated objective of making India’s legislative process “better informed, more transparent and participatory.” Its flagship product is the Legislative Brief: an analysis of one bill pending in Parliament, no longer than six pages, sent to every MP — and MPs call back asking for more.

The operation around the briefs is extensive. PRS runs a Wednesday morning Policy Dialogue series exclusively for MPs, well attended across parties, and acts as knowledge partner for the Thursday morning bill briefing sessions at the Constitution Club. It has reached about a thousand journalists through workshops and direct engagement, and its two-page “Vital Stats” documents are popular with the press. Each parliamentary session opens with a PRS Session Alert and closes with two reports — the Session Wrap and Plan vs. Performance — plus an Annual Conference of Effective Legislatures. It also built lawsofindia.org, a free online database of all state laws, described as the first effort of its kind in India.

The most direct intervention is the Legislative Assistants to MPs (LAMP) fellowship: participating MPs get a trained legislative assistant for three Parliament sessions — a response to PRS’s finding that MPs have no research staff at all and must do all preparatory work alone.

By its fifth year, about 250 MPs across political parties had reached out to PRS for inputs, and many more used its material without contacting it; the press had cited it nearly 400 times in a single year as a source on legislation and Parliament. Around 400 MPs of the then-concluding Parliament had engaged with its research reports, and PRS had begun reaching out to MLAs in the states.

The case for the MP

PRS’s founders started from a blunt observation: no individual, however intelligent, can be conversant with the full range of subjects Parliament handles, and MPs are expected to prepare alone while carrying heavy constituency pressure. The institute has also pushed back on caricatures of legislators — noting that more than 80 percent of MPs hold college degrees, average attendance runs near 80 percent, and Parliament has worked more than 90 percent of its scheduled time in recent sessions.

What this profile does not claim

• That the Home Ministry’s FCRA position on PRS has changed since the Economic Times report; no later decision was verified.
• That any foreign entity influenced PRS’s work; officials stated there were no specific allegations and no adverse report.
• Current leadership, staffing, or budget figures; none were verified from a fully-read source.
• That LAMP fellows work for all MPs; the programme was described as a pilot for participating MPs.