Source: www.pib.nic.in
Yesterday the Prime Minister reshuffled his Cabinet and inducted four cabinet ministers and four ministers of state. Since the beginning of the UPA II government, there have been three major Cabinet reshuffles and a number of minor readjustments in the portfolios of ministers. Analysing changes in the portfolios of ministers gives an insight into the churn in the political leadership of the different ministries of the government of India. Until recently there was no central online resource where information could be collated about cabinet reshuffles. The information was scattered between the websites of the President, the Prime Minister and the Press Information Bureau. Since 2012, the Cabinet Secretariat has started putting details about changes in the portfolio of the council of ministers in the public domain. However analysing this information becomes difficult as the information is split into different files and details about the Cabinet reshuffle do not go back till 2009. We have tried to collate data about changes in Cabinet portfolios since May 2009, so that it becomes easily accessible and can be analysed by interested individuals. The raw data file can be accessed here. This data could be analysed to see which Ministers have shifted across ministries or the average length of tenure of Ministers in different ministries. If you spot interesting trends in the raw data above, please share them with us on twitter@prslegislative We have done a preliminary analysis of the data to see which ministries have had the most changes in Cabinet Ministers since May 2009: - Railway Ministry portfolio has been held by six different Cabinet Ministers [Mamata Banerjee, Dinesh Trivedi, Mukul Roy, C P Joshi (twice), Pawan Kumar Bansal and now Mallikarjun Kharge] - Ministry of Law and Justice, Corporate Affairs and Science and Technology: Four Cabinet Ministers. - Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Civil Aviation, Rural Development, Tourism and Youth and Sports: Three Cabinet Ministers. - Ministries like Finance, Home, External Affairs, Communications and Information Technology, Human Resource Development: Two Cabinet Ministers. - Ministries like Agriculture and Non Conventional Energy Sources have the same Ministers from May 2009. This data also helped us put together a brief chronology of Cabinet reshuffles since the beginning of the term of the UPA II government:
| 23 & 28- May-09 | Cabinet sworn in. |
| 31-May-09 | Meria Kumar resigns as Minister of Water Resources to become Speaker of Lok Sabha. |
| 19-Apr-10 | Shashi Tharoor resigns as Minister of State from the Ministry of External Affairs. |
| 15-Nov-10 | A Raja resigns as Minister of Communications and Information Technology. Kapil Sibal gets additional charge of the ministry. |
| 19-Jan-11 | First major cabinet reshuffle. Most ministries affected. |
| 12-Jul-11 | Second major Cabinet reshuffle. Dinesh Trivedi assumes charge of Railway Ministry after Mamata Banerjee, Salman Khursheed becomes Law Minister, Jairam Ramesh moves to Rural Development. New Ministers like Rajeev Shukla (Parliamentary Affairs) and Jayanthi Natarajan (Environment and Forest) get inducted. |
| 18-Dec-11 | RLD joins UPA. Ajit Singh inducted as Minister of Civil Aviation. |
| 20-Mar-12 | Dinesh Trivedi resigns and Mukul Roy becomes Railway Minister. |
| 27-Jun-12 | Pranab Mukherjee resigns as Finance Minister to fight the presidential election. |
| 31-Jul-12 | P Chidambaram moves from Home to Finance Ministry and Sushil Kumar Shinde moves from Power to Home Ministry. |
| 22-Sep-12 | Trinamool withdraws support to UPA. All TMC ministers resign. C P Joshi assumes additional charge of Railway Ministry. |
| 28-Oct-12 | Third major reshuffle. S M Krishna resigns from Ministry of External Affairs and Salman Khursheed takes over. Ashwani Kumar comes in place of Salman Khursheed in Law and Justice. Ambika Soni resigns and Manish Tiwari takes charge of Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Ajay Maken moves from Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports to Housing and Urban Poverty Alliviation. |
| 21-Mar-13 | DMK withdraws support. All DMK Ministers resign. |
| 11-May-13 | Ashwani Kumar and Pawan Kumar Bansal resign. Kapil Sibal takes charge of Ministry of Law and Justice and C P Joshi takes charge of Railways. |
| 16-Jun-13 | Ajay Maken and C P Joshi resign. |
Elections to the 14th Legislative Assembly of Karnataka are scheduled to be held on May 5, 2013. Of the 224 assembly constituencies that will go into polls, 36 are reserved for Scheduled Castes and 15 for Scheduled Tribes. Voting will take place in 50,446 polling stations across Karnataka [1. Election Commission India]. In this blog, we analyse electoral trends between 1989 and 2008 and the performance of the current Karnataka Assembly.
Figure 1: Electoral trends since 1989, source: Election Commission of India, PRS.
In the last elections, held in 2008, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) formed the government, winning 110 of the 226 seats in the Assembly. The BJP has steadily increased its seat share since 1989: it won four seats in 1989, 44 in 1999 and 79 in 2004. The Indian National Congress (INC) had a 179 seat majority in 1989 (79% of the assembly) which fell to 34 seats in 1994. The INC subsequently increased their tally from 65 seats in 2004 to 80 seats in 2008. However, the INC continued to have the highest share of votes polled (except in 1994) even as its share of seats decreased. The 1990s also saw the emergence of the Janata Dal (S) who won the 1994 elections with 115 seats. Janata Dal’s emergence is part of a broader theme of increased participation by regional parties in Karnataka. In 1989, 20 parties contested the elections, seven of which were national parties but in 2008, 30 parties contested, of which only five were national parties. Performance of the current Assembly As we approach the end of the term of the current Assembly, a brief look at its work from 2008 to 2013:
Figure 2: Days of sitting - Karnataka assembly, source: RTI, PRS.
