NEW DELHI: Congress MP from Punjab, Jasbir Singh Gill, on Wednesday requested the government in Lok Sabha to bring a law, like the ones in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to cut down the number of guests and dishes to save people from unnecessary expenses in Indian weddings.
Speaking during Zero Hour, Gill termed the practice of calling huge numbers of guests and spending a lot of money on food in weddings as a “social evil”, and said he had a menu which showed 289 food items in the list, costing Rs 2,500 per plate. “I would like to request that we bring in such a law that can restrict the ‘baraat ‘ with a gathering of 50 guests each from girl’s and boy’s sides, and the number of dishes to 11,” he said.
Responding to his request in the House, speaker Om Birla suggested Gill to take a lead on this by practicing it as an MP. “As a parliamentarian, why don’t you start this practice and then the country will follow,” he said, noting that such practice can be stopped not by law but by parliamentarians’ action through their willpower. “If all the MPs start doing this, then the country itself will follow. We all lead the nation,” said Birla.
Gill, however, said he was already doing it, but the people would follow it only through a law. He said Afghanistan and Pakistan already had such laws. “If we want to save people, we’ll have to bring such a law,” said the Congress MP.