New Delhi : The Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) convened on Friday to review the Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-Ninth Amendment) Bill 2024 and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2024, engaging with domain experts to assess the long-term socio-economic impact of synchronising national, state, and union territory elections.
The depositions before the JPC contended that India’s staggered election cycle results in massive fiscal waste, discourages private corporate investment, ties up the administrative and security apparatus and perpetuates a campaign culture which in turn is detrimental to good governance and the health of democracy.
Detailing the systemic inefficiencies of separate elections, Chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister S Mahendra Dev set out how the cost of running separate elections goes far beyond the cost of running the actual elections.
ECI data from the five major jurisdictions shows that holding standalone Assembly elections immediately after the 2014 Lok Sabha polls cost Rs 811.1 crore (virtually the same as the Rs 838.7 crore which was spent in those same areas in the LS elections), i.e. a duplication of expenditure of approximately 96.7 per cent.
Synchronisation would deliver massive savings in terms of logistics and manpower. A move to a synchronised election cycle would reduce the requirement for polling staff by 28 per cent (i.e. save 1.04 crore public sector person-days over a 5-year cycle).
It would free up the CAPF and State Armed Police from the long campaign to count deployment schedules which they are currently required to undergo, enabling them to concentrate on their core internal security functions. It would also merge the two separate statutory paid voting holidays under Section 135B of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 into a single election, thereby eliminating the need for two separate statutory wage-paid non-working days for the enterprise.
About policy distortions, Dev pointed to several empirical studies which show that state administrations will routinely cut their discretionary commodity tax receipts, divert electricity supplies and issue farm debt waivers prior to elections to win over key voting groups. Infrastructure projects which are initiated in the run-up to the polls also see a marked drop in completion rates whenever an incumbent administration is changed.
