State funding of elections on cards

New Delhi: The Union Cabinet wants to bring some electoral reforms and state funding of the elections is top on the agenda.

The general consensus among the political parties is that state funding will help check corruption but the big question is how much can the government spend on candidates?

Bharatiya Janata Party president and Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Lal Kishenchand Advani on Tuesday said the state should fund elections to curb corruption.

He wrote to the government seeking the implementation of the recommendations of the Indrajit Gupta Committee on state funding of elections to curb corruption.

The letters pointed out that the committee had made the unanimous recommendations in favour of state funding of elections to check corruption and role of black money in the poll process, BJP Parliamentary Party spokesman Vijay Kumar Malhotra said.

Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee and Rajya Sabha Chairman Bhairon Singh Shekhawat have also been sent the letters two to three days back in the wake of the cash-for-questions scam.

"But the question was raised at that time that how the required money could be raised," he said, adding that Advani had opined that it was possible that money for the purpose could be drawn from the MPLAD fund.

The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government had said in its Common Minimum Programme (CMP) that it was committed to electoral reforms, which included initiating steps to introduce State funding of election campaigns at the earliest.

A general election in the world's largest democracy,India, is a gigantic exercise, equivalent to conducting polls in Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia all at once. So claims a report from the National Commission on Electoral Reforms that reviewed laws, processes and reforms.

The cost to the exchequer of the Parliamentary election held in April 2004 is estimated to be anywhere in between Rs 818 crore to Rs 1,000 crore and this covers only the government's expenses on conducting the polls.

Political parties spend much more than what the government has earmarked for the actual conduct of the polls. The campaign expenditure of political parties has also been growing over the years. But no accurate figures of this spending are available.

While parties are allowed to spend as much money on campaigns as they want, recent Supreme Court judgments have said that unless a political party can specifically account for the money thus spent, it will be added to the election expenses of the candidates concerned.

The accountability thus imposed on candidates and parties has curtailed some of the more extravagant campaigning that used to be a feature of Indian elections.

The limit for election expenditure is revised from time to time. At present the limit of expenditure for a Parliamentary constituency is Rs 25 lakhs while for an Assembly constituency the amount is 10 lakhs.