Of Congress president Sonia Gandhi?s suggestions to party colleagues on the 125th anniversary celebrations, the most noteworthy is the one about how the government should consider funding of elections. ?State funding?, she said after talking of the need to confront corruption head-on, ?of elections has been talked about in different forums from time to time. We should now consider how best to take this proposal forward decisively.? It can be no one?s case that state funding will wipe out corruption from the country, but there is little doubt it will be a big step. Do the math to understand how insignificant election-funding is and do the math to understand how important it is. Assume that, on average, a sum of Rs 10 crore is spent per Lok Sabha seat by all candidates, so that?s Rs 5,400 crore; raise this amount three times, say, to cover all other elections as well as the funding needs of political parties at the time they are both in an out of power. So that?s Rs 20,000 crore every 5 years or Rs 4,000 crore a year. Considering India?s GDP is around Rs 62 lakh crore, that?s a corruption requirement of much less than even a tenth of one percentage point; change the denominator to just the level of, say, industrial sector output and that will make the number higher, but not significantly so.
Two possibilities are available. One, the level of corruption is way, way beyond what is legitimately required. Two, though the political system wants Rs 4,000 crore, it can?t get this directly, so it gives collection rights to various persons, along with various degrees of get-out-jail-free passes to the collectors, and this is how corruption multiplies manifold. In which case, getting the state to fund political parties is certainly a big step forward in attempting to cut this link. To work, needless to say, election funding has to be done at a level that is realistic, not the piddling sums the Election Commission thinks should be the norm. Other suggestions to keep down election spending include having a dual-vote system, where everyone in a constituency gets two votes, one for the candidate and one for the party. Since some proportion of seats are to be decided on the basis of the total votes polled across constituencies, and not by the voted polled for a candidate in that constituency, this ensures parties can add their votes across constituencies as well?the parties will then be that less desperate to spend money for each constituency, and will concentrate on fewer constituencies. It is easy to scoff at some of the other points the Congress president made, such as the need to fast-track corruption cases, given the party did precious little about A Raja for more than 3 years. But we can scoff and leave it at that, or we can take the most valuable suggestion and encourage her party to run with it.