There are a little over 4000 MLAs across all states in India. For the citizen, a law passed by his state legislature is as relevant and important as one passed by Parliament. And MLAs also have no research support available to them to understand and reflect on policy issues before voting for them in the state assembly. To make matters worse, the sittings in many state assemblies are abysmally low as can be seen from this graph showing some states. 
For a while now, several MPs have been urging PRS to initiate some work with MLAs. We started a Policy Guide series some months ago -- essentially a 2-page note on policy issues of contemporary relevance that would be useful for MLAs. We started sending these out to MLAs in several states, and some MLAs called PRS back for more information and research. As a way to increase the engagement, PRS decided to hold a workshop for MLAs. For this, we partnered with Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, and held our first workshop for MLAs from Jan 3-6, 2011. In the first edition of the workshop, we had 44 MLAs participating from a dozen states across India. The response was overwhelmingly positive (see short videos of MLA feedback here), with requests from MLAs to hold more such workshops for other MLAs as well. Several also wanted longer duration workshops on important policy issues. We see this as a small beginning for a sustained engagement with our MLAs.
We need your ideas and inputs. Ideas on how we can inform many more people who are interested in policy about what they can access on the PRS website. The mission of PRS is to strengthen the legislative process by making it better informed, more transparent and participatory. The statement has three important components: (a) Better informed: This implies that legislators and citizens need to be better informed about the implications of legislation. For us in PRS, this implies producing easy-to-understand non-partisan analysis that can be made available to MPs and citizens. This also includes our continual efforts to personally brief MPs and political parties on the details and implications of each Bill. (b) Transparent: We mean that all proceedings of Parliament and the work of MPs in Parliament should be easily accessible to citizens. In an operational sense, this includes the effort we put into creating the Bill Track section on our website where every Bill that is pending in Parliament can be accessed, and the current status of the Bill can be tracked. It also includes the MP Track section in which we have up-to-date information about the engagement levels of MPs in Parliament. We also have a twitter page www.twitter.com/prslegislative and a Facebook presence. (c) Participatory: Which simply means that once citizens know the information, and would like to articulate a point of view, they should reach out to policy makers and get their point of view across to them. To promote this, we have had a number of workshops with NGOs and have produced a primer on "Engaging with Policy Makers". These are just some examples of what we are doing in each of these three areas. Our website has much more information. But we are increasingly of the view that we need to reach out many more people who are interested in policy -- even if it is sector specific. We would be grateful for any ideas that you might have, which you can post as responses to this post. If you also have specific ideas on what you like on our website and what can be better, do let us know. Thanks, in advance.
