General election '89: Crores spent on campaigning, poll preparations

There was hoopla. There was din. And there was much dipping into pockets. The choreography for the biggest show on earth came expensive. As political parties in the country wooed the world's largest electorate of 500 million, an astounding sum - perhaps exceeding Rs 1.000 crore - was spent on electioneering.If you think that number is outlandish, consider the following:The official estimate of government spending on the elections is Rs 166 crore. But Election Commission sources say the actual figure must have been upwards of Rs 180 crore - excluding around Rs 100 crore spent on revising the electoral rolls and an estimated Rs 50 crore spent on the assembly elections. The total: around Rs 330 crore.Political parties spent a huge sum, possibly running into several hundred crores. Estimates of the AICC(I)'s publicity budget alone run to more than Rs 75 crore, including a Rs 20-crore advertising campaign and expenditure of Rs 10 crore on videos. Over Rs 200 crore was possibly spent on "volunteers", the men who man the polling booths and paste posters on walls. The 6,084 Lok Sabha candidates who contested the ninth Lok Sabha elections may also have splurged roughly Rs 6 crore on petrol bills - to name just one item.Quite simply, inflation, aburgeoning electorate and the need to use electronic media have forced the Government, parties and candidates to foot fatter bills. At the Government level, the first Lok Sabha elections in 1952 cost the treasury just Rs 10.4 crore, or 60 paise per voter.In the second election in 1957, the figure dropped to Rs 5.9 crore (31 paise). But since then, expenditure has risen exponentially. This year's election was more than twice as costly to the exchequer (around Rs 180 crore or Rs 3.50 per voter) as the previous one (Rs 88.4 crore or Rs 2.20) (see chart).What's true of the Government is true of parties. "Ten years ago, we could get people to work for very little. No w, we are not only expected to pay cash but also provide food and liquor," lamented a veteran Congress(I) minister.It's impossible to determine the overall expenditure by political parties, because few know how many vehicles parties bought (one guesstimate: 2,000 of various kinds).There are sundry other expenses that can't be pinned down.Legally, each candidate is not permitted to spend more than Rs 20,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh, the ceiling depending on the constituency. But there's a loophole: there is no ceiling on spending by parties or by supporters and well wishers. So parties tend to chip in by footing much of the bill for transport and people, which account for 60 to 70 per cent of the campaign expenditure.Easily the greatest expense was on people - for Organising rallies and mobilising crowds. And the Congress(I) had to shell out the most to Volunteers' because it has no cadre base.An inkling of the kind of money spent on people can be obtained by a rough and ready reckoning of how much the Congress(I) spent on one of its candidates in Delhi on polling day alone. In one of the bigger Delhi constituencies, it had around 2,000 polling booths.Assuming that there were at least 10 volunteers per booth and that Rs 80 was spent on each in cash and kind, the total works out to Rs 16 lakh.Even if this was an exceptional case and assuming that Rs 16 lakh was spent by all parties put together in each constituency, nearly Rs 84 crore would have been spent on volunteers on polling day in the 525 constituencies which went to the polls. Even if they'd been employed for just two or three days, the sum would come to Rs 168 crore to Rs 252 crore.Cut to the normally busy Indian Institute of Technology gate intersection in south Delhi late last month. Some time past midnight, 20 young men got off a van. Within 15 minutes the wall of a nearby building was plastered with a hundred posters.Said Rakesh, 18, a college student: "It's good pocket money we're getting - Rs50 for six hours of work, two meals and a ride back home." But posters are passe. This has been a video election - with heavyweights spending lakhs to sell themselves.At least 30 video raths - let out by New Delhi's Jain Studio - were on the road. The video industry recorded an estimated billing of around Rs 10 crore during this election. At least 20,000 audio cassettes were in circulation.The logistics of electioneering are truly staggering. Hoardings, cutouts, leaflets, badges, pandals and public address systems, in tens of thousands. At least 100 million posters valued at about Rs 10 crore, consuming over 2,000 tonnes of paper.With a deeper war chest, the ruling party tends to spend more than the Opposition on its candidates. Vishwajeet Prithvijit Singh, the Congress (I)'s election coordinator, provided a list of items (including, for the first time, 1.5 lakh stick-on bindis per candidate) distributed by the Congress(I). The value of the material, for each Lok Sabha candidate, works out to just under Rs 1 lakh. Clearly, this was an underestimate. Admitted a Congressman: "Most of us are getting material worth twice as much, but the party can't disclose it." If that's true, the Congress(I) must have provided more than Rs 10-crore worth of material alone to its candidates since it contested 509 seats.The Opposition was no laggard either. Take, for example, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. In Andhra Pradesh, every Telugu Desam Party (TDP) candidate got 10,000 posters, 7,000 flags, 500 banners, 15,000 badges, 50,000 buntings, 250 tin plates, 50 audio cassettes and a couple of video cassettes and film prints.Before the election, a TDP politburo member said the party would be spending Rs 2.5 crore on all this, with candidates forking out extra sums. In Karnataka, Janata Dal sources said the party spent over Rs 10 crore on providing its candidates with just cash and material. If the Opposition met a Rs 12.5 crore bill for two states, what would it have spent all over the country?On another plane, many of the 6,084 candidates for the ninth Lok Sabha elections - not to speak of those who campaigned for assembly polls - would have met some of their petrol bills, opened their purse strings to provide tea and perhaps food to their supporters.True, many of these were low-budget independents. Even so, several others were backed by parties. In Andhra Pradesh, said the top politburo member, each assembly candidate would spend a minimum of Rs 3 lakh; a parliamentary candidate, Rs 8 lakh.In Karnataka, according to Janata Dal sources, the average expense of an assembly candidate must have been around Rs 5 lakh and that of a Lok Sabha candidate Rs 25 lakh. So candidates of just these parties in these two states would have spent some Rs 47 crore in electioneering expenses - apart from the expenditure incurred on them by their parties.What is more, there are some election expenses that are difficult to estimate - for example, paint, postage, telephone calls, hotel bills and, of course, travel. In other words, Rs 1,000 crore is not such a high figure for the total expenses incurred on the ninth Lok Sabha elections. It costs a lot to win over that poor Indian voter.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Dec 15, 1989 00:00 IST--- ENDS ---

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General election '89: Crores spent on campaigning, poll preparations

Crores spent on campaigning and poll preparations.

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