One Nation, One Election

Context: Pandemic must encourage reasoned debate on simultaneous elections.

About One Nation One Election:

• The idea has been around since at least 1983 when the Election Commission first mooted it.
• Until 1967 when simultaneous elections were the norm.

The concept needs to be debated mainly around five issues:

• Financial costs of conducting elections:
  • Directly budgeted costs are around Rs 300 crore for a state the size of Bihar.
  • But there are other financial costs and incalculable economic costs.
  • For e.g. the economic costs of lost teaching weeks by the teachers, delayed public works, badly de- livered or undelivered welfare schemes to the poor have never been calculated.
• Cost of repeated administrative freezes:
  • The Model Code of Conduct (MCC) has economic costs, too, impacting the construction and tenders, time overruns translating into cost overruns, and the huge costs of salaries and other administrative expenditures continue to be incurred.
  • Invisible cost of missing leadership: Important meetings and decisions get postponed, with costs and consequences that are difficult to calculate.
• Visible and invisible costs of repeatedly deploying security forces:
  • A bigger invisible cost is paid by the nation in terms of diverting these forces from sensitive areas and in terms of the fatigue and illnesses that repeated cross-country deployments bring about.
• Campaign and finance costs of political parties;
• The question of regional/smaller parties having a level playing field:
  • Fixed five-year terms for state legislatures, in fact, take away the central government’s power to dissolve state assemblies.