NEW DELHI: A new attendance study of Parliament's 2026 Budget Session, released by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) just ahead of the Monsoon Session's July 20 start, has turned up a striking regional finding: Jammu and Kashmir's four Rajya Sabha members recorded the second-highest average attendance of any state or Union Territory in the country, behind only Delhi. The Union Territory's Lok Sabha members landed closer to the middle of the national table by comparison, while Ladakh's lone MP came in well above average.
CHRI describes the report, titled Attendance Record of the Members of Parliament: Budget Session 2026, as its first attempt at this kind of exercise. Built from the sitting-wise registers that the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha Secretariats publish online, the analysis steers away from ranking individual lawmakers and groups the data instead by political party and by state or Union Territory.
Rajya Sabha: J&K trails Delhi
Among states and Union Territories with more than one Rajya Sabha member, J&K's four MPs averaged 95.16 per cent attendance across the session's 31 sittings — behind NCT-Delhi's three MPs at 96.77 per cent, but ahead of Gujarat (94.27 per cent), Uttar Pradesh (91.13 per cent) and Madhya Pradesh (89.96 per cent). Three of the four J&K MPs belong to the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (JKNC); measured as a party, JKNC's 94.62 per cent average was the second-best of any political party in the entire Rajya Sabha, behind only the Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam's lone MP, who attended every sitting. For comparison, the BJP's 111 Rajya Sabha MPs averaged 84.39 per cent nationally, and the Congress's 30 MPs averaged 80.66 per cent.
Lok Sabha: Moderate to High
J&K's Lok Sabha numbers were less exceptional. CHRI's tables show attendance records for four of J&K's five Lok Sabha members (the study's methodology, applied nationwide, sets aside the Prime Minister, Union Ministers, the Speaker and the Leader of the Opposition, since the register doesn't log their attendance), and this group averaged 25.75 of the 31 sittings, or 83.06 per cent.
That's 13th place among the 22 states and UTs with more than two Lok Sabha MPs: behind a top five of Uttarakhand, Delhi, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, but ahead of Odisha, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, among others.
Within JKNC's two-member Lok Sabha contingent, the picture is more uneven. One MP attended somewhere between 24 and 27 of the 31 sittings, safely above the 75 per cent line CHRI uses as its benchmark for adequate attendance, while the other signed in for between 16 and 23 sittings. Averaged together, the pair's Lok Sabha attendance comes to 23 days, or 74.19 per cent — just short of that mark.
Ladakh, which sends a single member to the Lok Sabha, did comparatively well: 27 of 31 sittings, or 87.10 per cent, making it the sixth-best figure among the 13 states and UTs that elect just one or two Lok Sabha MPs. That puts Ladakh ahead of Sikkim, Nagaland, Manipur, Tripura, Meghalaya and Puducherry, though behind Chandigarh and Lakshadweep, both of which recorded perfect attendance, and behind Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Arunachal Pradesh and Goa. Ladakh has no legislature of its own, so it has no seat in the Rajya Sabha to measure.
Rest of Parliament
The finding that anchors CHRI's broader report is that fewer than two-thirds of MPs in either House met even a 75 per cent attendance bar during the Budget Session. Of the 483 Lok Sabha MPs whose records were analysed, only 309 (63.98 per cent) cleared that bar, and 69 MPs (14.29 per cent) turned up for fewer than half the sittings; just 101 MPs, about a fifth of the total, had a perfect record. The Rajya Sabha's numbers were similar: 159 of 255 MPs analysed (62.35 per cent) hit the 75 per cent mark, 56 fell below half, and 59 MPs (23.14 per cent) attended every sitting.
Smaller parties outperformed bigger ones nationally, too: the RLD and RLP had perfect Lok Sabha attendance, and the Samajwadi Party's 37 MPs averaged 28.43 sittings, ahead of the BJP's 26.46 and the Congress's 23.13. Assam had the weakest Lok Sabha showing of any state with more than two MPs, and in the Rajya Sabha, West Bengal's members averaged just 42.04 per cent, the lowest of any state or UT in that category.
No names, by design
CHRI Director Venkatesh Nayak framed the study as descriptive rather than a ranking of individual MPs, saying the report withholds names because "neither praising nor naming and shaming anybody is our purpose."
The organisation also flags a methodological caveat: signing the attendance register isn't constitutionally required, ministers generally skip it altogether, and an MP can sign in without staying for the sitting, or attend without signing. The figures track recorded attendance, not necessarily time actually spent in the House.
Among its recommendations, the CHRI's called upon the Parliament to revive the hourly attendance charts Secretariats once maintained, arguing that a single daily signature says little about how long members actually stay on the floor. It also noted that the Rajya Sabha's website already lists reasons (illness, "prior committed engagements," personal reasons) for members' extended absences, a practice the Lok Sabha Secretariat has yet to adopt.
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