Agenda control in parliamentary oversight committees: evidence from India

How do parliamentary committees determine which executive instruments merit scrutiny? This article examines agenda control in India's Lok Sabha Committee on Subordinate Legislation, the legislature's primary mechanism for reviewing delegated legislation. It draws on a corpus of 320 committee reports spanning seven decades (1954–2023) and employs BERTopic-based computational topic modelling. We find that the Committee's effective oversight diverges systematically from its formal mandate. Procedurally, the Committee is preoccupied with chronic executive delay, producing a reactive rather than proactive oversight agenda. Substantively, attention is disproportionately concentrated on government service rules, revealing agenda control operating through three interlocking mechanisms: structural-institutional constraints, actor-centred discretion and delegation hazards. For Westminster-derived systems, our findings suggest that accountability for delegated legislation is decided upstream of scrutiny, in the opaque processes that determine which instruments reach a committee at all. Reforms targeting committee powers alone, without addressing agenda formation, are therefore likely to fall short.