Essay on Electoral Reforms Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.
In 1974 Jayapraksh Narayan set up the committee on Electoral reforms under the eminent jurist VM Tarkunde which made its first recommendations in 1975.
The Tarkunde Committee opined that state funding of elections in the prevailing conditions was impracticable. According to it, some families could be made available to every constituency such as making available school rooms and halls for meetings, providing lists of registered numbers of voters to candidates, etc. The committee also made a recommendation that all recognized political parties must keep accurate and complete accounts which should include both sources of income and details of expenditure and which should be audited by CA’s. The public should be allowed to inspect these accounts on payment of moderate charges.
Most people believe that the political parties receive money from people in the name of party funds to fight elections. This is the root cause of all electoral ills. Money power gathers muscle power and this leads to booth capturing and criminalization of politics. Thus, there emerges the so-called politician-criminal nexus which takes upon itself extrajudicial powers, having no regard to the interests of the common people Whom it professes to represent.
This is the reason that state funding is said to be one of the solutions. An all-India party’ meeting was held in May 1998 andIndrajit Gupta Committee was set up in 1998 to study in detail the issue of election funding. The committee held such funding – constitutionally and legally justified, but according to it, it should be allowed only to national and-state parties which are recongised by the Election Commission. The committee recommended state funding only in kind and not in cash.
As per recommendations of the committee, the state should bear only a part of the financial burden of the political parties which could be increased progressively. The committee recommended that at the start a separate election fund of Rs. 600 crore should be created by the central government.
The committee recommended some facilities for each candidate of a political party, among them : (a) specified quantity of petrol or diesel for vehicles for use for the election campaign; (b) a specified quantity of paper for printing election literature and unofficial identity slips to voters; (c) five copies of the electoral roll of the constituency (d) a set of loudspeakers (one set for an assembly constituency and a maximum of six seats for a Parliamentary constituency) (e) one deposit–free telephone, the number of free calls for the main campaign office in every constituency/segment of a parliamentary constituency being fixed. (0 minimum arrangement for the candidates’ camp outside each polling station. (It should be restricted to the day of polling only.)
The committee further recommended that each political party must submit its annual accounts regularly to the income tax authorities. It must also submit a complete account of its election expenses in two parts, that is on general expenditure, and expenditure pertaining to each individual candidate. The UPA government issued a ten-point process of state funding of elections on a limited scale as. a part of electoral reforms. However, on such a matter, a consensus among the political parties is very necessary.
