On Friday a petitioner urged the Supreme Court to declare that citizens have a fundamental right to directly petition the Parliament to deliberate and debate on important issues of public interest. A bench of Justices K M Joseph and B V Nagarathna sought a response from the central government and listed the PIL (Karan Garg vs Union of India and Others) for hearing after two weeks.The idea is not without precedent. Citizens in the United Kingdom can petition parliament - 10,000 signatures gets a response from the government and after one lakh signatures the petition is considered for debate in Parliament. The right to petition Parliament is a question will draw attention as it underlines public perception that debates in parliament do not address issues haunting people and that elected representatives are not representing the interests of those who elect them. A good place to start would be public expenditure. For instance what is the sum total of all the money that is spent on welfare by the centre and the states? More importantly what is the level or quality of outcomes achieved with the use of tax payer monies? Arriving at the number of schemes by itself is a challenge. For sure, websites of union and state governments list out schemes, covering an array of insufficiencies and deprivations. The programmes could be managed by either the Union Government, the states or could be a collaboration of the Union and States governments. For instance the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment lists schemes for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, other backward classes, for manual scavengers, for those with disabilities and so on. The Ministry of Rural Development lists a host of schemes under acronyms such as MGNREGS, PMAY, NSAP, SAGY, DAY-NRLM, DDUGKY, et al. The pensioners’ portal lists 28 schemes for senior citizens. Add to this list schemes administered by the states on their own or with the Union Government. A good way to triangulate the number of schemes administered by centre and states is to look at Direct Benefit Transfers on the DBT Bharat portal. Now this portal classifies schemes by department. As per DBT Bharat 53 departments of government of India administer 310 schemes using the Aadhaar based DBT system. The DBT system operates through the National Payments Corporation of India, a not for profit platform managing DBT and payments via the National Automated Clearing House. Data reveals the stunning volume of schemes and transactions. As per NPCI data, there are 8976 user codes for schemes using DBT - some of which are under same or similar names. The classification of entries - all India and States - suggests that 587 of these codes are for payments administered by the union government and the rest by state governments.