Over the last decade, some of the most significant legislations have been passed in Parliament with minimal debate in both houses. The Aaadhar Act of 2016, amendments to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) and the Income Tax Act of 2025 are all examples of laws pushed through the Lok Sabha as money bills—a route meant for budgetary measures, but increasingly used to bypass the Rajya Sabha.
For instance, in 2010, during the UPA government’s time, the National Identification Authority of India Bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha to give a unique identification number to every Indian citizen. Referred by the Lok Sabha to a parliamentary committee due to its controversial nature, the bill faced fierce criticism for its implications on privacy, security and data protection. After a year of deliberation, the bill was rejected. Six years later, the Aadhaar Act returned under the Narendra Modi government.
This time, it was introduced in the Lok Sabha as a money bill, and so it took only eight days for the Parliament to pass a law which gave the state access to the biometric data of over 1 billion people. The Rajya Sabha could not implement any changes or reject the bill; its recommendations were ignored, and the bill was passed without edits.
Ultimately, what should have been one of the most debated laws in India was quietly enacted.
A money bill is a specialised form of legislation in India, meant only for laws related to taxation, government borrowing, and public spending. It can only be introduced in the Lok Sabha and does not require approval from the Rajya Sabha. It was meant to ensure that financial decisions rest with representatives in the Lok Sabha who are directly elected by the people.
But since 2016, money bills, which were usually considered an exception, have increasingly become routine. The use of money bills has created a convenient path for the Modi government to push through complex and consequential legislation.
Defined in Article 110 as a bill that “contains only provisions dealing with all or any” of six clauses which encompass taxation, government spending, and borrowing, money bills can only be introduced and drafted in the lower house of parliament. Although the Rajya Sabha can make recommendations, they are not binding, and the bill can be passed—with or without changes—by a simple majority in the Lok Sabha.
In most other matters, both houses debate prospective laws and implement changes before they are passed. In doing so, they act as checks and counterbalances to the desires and powers of the other. But by design, money bills bypass Rajya Sabha scrutiny to place the people’s money in the hands of the people’s representatives.
The vulnerability introduced by the removal of one level of scrutiny is meant to be offset by the Constitution’s provisions, which exist to ensure the proper usage of money bills and thus to curb their excessive and unjustified invocation.
For example, clause 2 of Article 110 reads: “A Bill shall not be deemed to be a Money Bill by reason only that it provides for the imposition of fines or other pecuniary penalties, or for the demand or payment of fees for licenses or fees for services rendered, or by reason that it provides for the imposition, abolition, remission, alteration or regulation of any tax by any local authority or body for local purposes.”
Essentially, it states that not all bills about financial matters can be classified as money bills. Coupled with the definition in clause 1, which places an emphasis on the word “only,” the Constitution makes it clear that bills passed through this method must not contain any provisions unrelated to the criteria laid out in the Article.
The Income Tax Bill 2025, which was classified and introduced in the Lok Sabha as a money bill, focuses on streamlining the process of tax administration and adjusting it to today’s context to replace the Income Tax Act of 1961. Since its introduction, it has faced backlash over its provisions regarding the rights afforded to income tax authorities, including search and seizure.
Clause 247 grants authorities sweeping access to digital information ranging from online financial platforms to personal social media accounts and private conversations. It states that authorities, during operations, may “gain access by overriding the access code” to any computer system or digital space. This expansion of rights raises two questions: how to ensure that authorities will not take for granted their increased access to once-personal data, and how this provision was passed as a money bill despite arguably being outside the scope of the constitutional definition.
This bill is the most recent in a long list of laws that contain controversial and non-money-related provisions, which were passed as money bills and thus evaded complete parliamentary scrutiny. On paper, these bills address taxation, registration and expenditure, but in practice, they affect fundamental rights and freedoms that the Constitution guarantees its citizens.
Especially in India’s political context, where the BJP had an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha for ten years from 2014-2024, the method chosen to introduce these provisions—by packaging them within money bills—increased the chances of bills passing without the opposition that they might have faced in the upper house, where the majority was less overwhelming.
In 2016, for example, the Aadhar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act was passed as a money bill. Of its 8 parts, most contained clauses about the format and issuance of the identity document, rather than clauses directly related to taxes or the Consolidated Fund of India.
As such, it is technically incompatible with the definition and criteria for a money bill. Facing significant protests in the Rajya Sabha for bypassing the regular path to enactment and for its provisions on personal data, the Act was challenged in court in the case KS Puttaswamy v Union of India in 2017.
A key question asked in the case was whether the right to privacy was protected by the Constitution. Although not mentioned by name in the original text, the court ruled that the right to privacy is a fundamental, inalienable right under Article 21 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to life and personal liberty to every individual. The fundamental right to privacy is intended to protect individuals from both state overreach and harassment from non-state actors, and covers three primary aspects: physical interference, informational privacy, and the privacy of choice.
Despite its status as a fundamental right, however, the right to privacy is not immune to encroachment. Debates about the extent of this right often attempt to balance two ideals– collective security and individual liberty. The court classified the right as a right that is not absolute, stating that it can be limited or even disregarded depending on the context. For instance, relevant authorities may overlook the right to privacy and intercept private communications during anti-terror operations, or may suspend parts of the right to assembly through the imposition of a curfew during a public emergency.
This being said, when these encroachments, irrespective of stated necessity, bypass scrutiny and are strong-armed into law through a procedural loophole, it calls into question the validity of the process and the democracy in which it operates. This is because even though the Constitution does allow for rights to be suspended, these are in narrow circumstances, like a national emergency.
It does not allow for these suspensions to be enacted and normalised without oversight or debates about proportionality. In the Puttaswamy judgement, the presiding judges applied a proportionality test, which is a four-part test to decide whether the infringement of a right is valid. These parts are the existence of a legitimate state aim, the suitability and necessity of the law for the issue at hand, and proportionality in the stricter sense, referring to a cost-benefit analysis.
But a legal test is applied after a violation of one's rights has occurred. Before a law’s passage, compelling conversations about necessity and proportionality can only occur if a law is debated in both houses of parliament. When a money bill with provisions that allow for a violation of rights passes without these conversations, the Indian system of checks and balances is not allowed to function as intended.
Additionally, the wider debate about individual rights and collective security is based on the assumption that the government has the best interests of all its citizens in mind. This dynamic, while ideal, is often the opposite in instances of privacy and surveillance, where the best interests of governments are to retain power, often at the expense of citizens.
For instance, when the parliament passed amendments to the PMLA between 2015-2019 as finance acts, they circumvented these checks and balances to give undue power—not only to infringe upon rights but also from due process—to the Enforcement Directorate. After these amendments, the ED may arrest people without lodging an FIR, conduct raids on private property without prior authorisation, and detain people on mere suspicion of a crime while reversing the presumption of innocence.
With the enforcement agency’s track record of alleged partisan influence, the risk of money bill provisions being utilised and exploited to punish dissent and political opposition is high. The Income Tax Act, if passed, would extend similar powers into the digital sphere for the Income Tax Department, allowing authorities to bypass passwords and encryption without the authorisation of a court.
This pattern of invasive laws being passed as money bills reflects a deeper structural flaw. India’s Constitution places trust in the executive and legislative branches to do right by the people, and thus does not implement stricter safeguards and checks on this power. The existing institutional check on the overuse of money bills lies in clause 3 of Article 110, which gives the speaker of the House the decisive vote if there is a debate about money bill classification.
But the speaker is not a politically impartial figure. Om Birla, the speaker since 2019, has omitted parts of opposition members’ speeches on controversial issues, expelled members en masse and passed crucial laws in their absence, kept the deputy speaker’s position vacant, and has intentionally muted the opposition’s microphones to stifle dissent. In this context, without the speaker’s objection to the passage of laws through this pathway, there is a system where the ruling party may pass invasive legislation without resistance, stripping people of their rights and consolidating their own power.
The only potential impartial check on money bill usage exists after its passage, if a law is taken to court, as in Puttaswamy. In this case, although the court ultimately upheld the Aadhaar Act as a valid money bill by broadening the scope of its applicability, the judgment was not unanimous. Justice DY Chandrachud, in his dissent, called the bill’s passage an “abuse of the constitutional process” and said that it undermined India’s bicameral structure.