New Delhi: Many national political parties in India did not utilize even half their declared total receipts between 2001-02 and 2005-06 despite one general election and 35 state elections being held in this period, according to an analysis of the income-tax (I-T) filings of seven political parties.
Politicians who do not wish to be named say that the average election expenditure by the candidate of a mainstream party in a Lok Sabha constituency could go up to Rs2 crore.
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The tax filings by the political parties show they spent, on an average, Rs75 lakh on every seat they won (the average also includes the amount spent on seats they lost; the number was arrived at by dividing total expenditure by the number of seats won).
The Election Commission, or EC, the constitutional body that conducts elections, caps the expenditure on each Lok Sabha seat at Rs25 lakh and that on each assembly seat at Rs10 lakh.
A psephologist and media expert said political parties are clearly under-reporting the amount they spend on elections, but added that the limit set by EC is low.
“Strictly going by the current inflationary trends, one can say that this limit is low. It does not quite allow the candidate to reach out to every voter in his constituency. For instance, for a Lok Sabha constituency with a population of 10 lakh, given the EC limit, each candidate ends up spending only a little above Rs2 on every voter. Today, almost 80% of the candidates end up exceeding the EC ceiling. However, the problem is that none of the political parties regularly file expense statements. If they had done so, the EC could have increased the limit further,” said N. Bhaskar Rao, chairman, Centre for Media Studies, or CMS. To be sure, candidates pick up part of their electoral expenses, but the numbers culled from the tax filings clearly demonstrate the need for more transparency in the way political parties raise and spend money.
Mint reported on 22 September that one-fifth of the country’s electorate was paid cash for votes and that in the recent assembly elections in Karnataka, one in every two voters was similarly induced.
...above-the-table donations are still much less than under-the-table funding.
Yashwant Sinha
Rajya Sabha member
The tax filings of seven parties were provided by the I-T department in response to a Right to Information application filed last year by the Association for Democratic Reforms, an Ahmedabad-based activist organization that isn’t associated with any political party. The seven are the Indian National Congress; the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP; the Nationalist Congress Party, or NCP; the Bahujan Samaj Party, or BSP; the Communist Party of India, or CPI; the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, and the Samajwadi Party, or SP.