Remove Election Expense Ceiling
Hey!
One of the plagues that India suffers from is corruption in politics. While corruption in politics is a global phenomena, in India there is a systematic issue that further makes it impossible for Indian politicians to not be corrupt. It is the ceiling on how much a politician can spend during election campaign.
Here is a pdf from election comission site that shows the ceilings in different states. As you can see the maximum money allowed to be spent by a candidate is Rs 25L, or about $42000 as per todays exchange rate.
Compare this figure with what is actually spent:
A candidate roughly spends in excess of Rs 10 crore in northern states, while it's about Rs 50-100 crore in the southern states.
Election comission is completely toothless to limit the money, and any effort to do so is a wasted effort, its a cat and mouse game, that politicians will keep finding loopholes and winning.
The end result is that the money spent is all necessarily black. EC, election comission, makes it impossible for a fair and honest candidate to fight, no body can win an election spending 10-20L, when his corrupt opponents are spending 100s of times more.
This ceiling must be abolished, or adjusted to some number suffeciently high to reflect the actual election expenditure, 100 Cr or so.
One of my dear friends asked:
Ryan Gazder: @Amit Upadhyay, how will raising the ceiling help, greedy corrupt people will just funnel even more black money into the system and self-perpetuate their way into power. Honest people may not even have the muscle or the funds required at the very outset... How can they ever hope to compete against already established political parties represented by generations of ill-gotten wealth?
The problem is not that the corrupt will not try to funnel more money, they will, and indeed for that reason the actual limit should be on the higher side, to counter their ability to spend the money. The real problem is, nobody honest today has any hope of competing against the corrupt. If corrupt politician spends 10 Cr today, and increases it to 20Cr tomorrow to counter the honest person who manages to raise a few Crs, the honest person will have a fighting chance, which is not possible in the measly 10L budget allowed today.
While this will not completely eliminate all political corruption, it will help the honest ones, as of today, it is impossible condition for honest politicians. Consider Arvind Kejriwal for example. He is going head on against Shiela Dixit in Delhi. Shiela is going to spend those 10s and 100s of Cr, but Kejriwal will be tied by the 20L limit, as he is a honest man, his entire foundation is his honesty. He will rather give up politics than violate the laws.
Another point is, we have not yet tested the true power of political fund raising in India. In US, Obama raised close to a billion dollars, and there is a very good possibility that the amount of money we can raise with proper fund raising far outweigh the pocket of corrupts.
Every politician needs money for election. If EC allowed it, at least part of this money would be accounted for, and that alone is a win in my opinion. The fact that it gives come honest politicians a fighting chance is just a bonus. All in all, if what I am demanding is implemented, it will be positive for India, with very little negative.
Employment and Expertise
There is yet another benefit. The current allowed limit of 20L or so is so low that not even a proper website can be created, well designed web application that does any sort of A/B testing, polls, social campaign integration etc will easily cost more than that.
Another thing one can do with legal money is PR agencies. PR agency can help a politician properly gauge the mood of public, and act accordingly, but no PR agency will work for less than 20-30L rupees, the entire budget EC thinks a member must spend.
A politician needs to hire advertising agencies to properly reach their voter base. A politician needs political consultants from leading consulting companies. None of them cost less than 20-30L each.
All this money will create employment. All this money will increase the expertise of everyone involved. Today who will want to work for a campaign that is funded by black money? No well respected company or agency wants to deal with black money. Sure some shady elements fill in, but that does not help neither the industry nor the politician and definitely not the public.
Due to this severe shortage of money our politicians are not able to serve us right.
What can you do to help?
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-- Amit Upadhyay