Synopsis
The world's largest exercise in democracy, India's sixteenth general election, took nearly four weeks to complete . Spread over nine stages, 543 constituencies, 8,251 candidates, representing some 300 parties, competed for the ballots of an electorate of 814 m eligible voters. In 8,30,866polling stations, 17,20,080 simple, robust and apparently tamper-proof electronic voting machines were deployed. With a continent-sized voters, India has learned to pull off virtually flawlessly the biggest, eye-popping democratic exercise with the kind of ease that is a part of its new brand equity. According to the Election Commission of India, the electoral population in 2014 was 81.45 crores, the largest in the world. There was an increase of 10 crores newly eligible voters. At rupees35 billion, this was also the longest and the most expensive general election in the history of the country excluding the expenses incurred for security and individual political parties. Parties spent nearly rupees 3.05 thousand crores (about US$500 million) in the election, according to the Centre for Media Studies. This is three times the amount spent in the previous election and is the world's second highest after the US$7 billion spent on the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The 16th Lok Sabha witnessed the highest-ever turnout in the elections, that of 66.38%. In itself, the turnout was a clear sign of the people crying out for a change. To complete this mammoth exercise, the Election Commission had to negotiate a long list of potential obstacles when scheduling the it took school exams, holidays, festivals, the harvest and even the monsoon into account. The organisational challenge of the polling was huge. The 2014 general election in India has been projected to cost about $5 billion, making it the costliest election ever in India and the second most expensive campaign in world history, behind only the 2012 U.S. presidential election, which cost some $7 billion, according to t
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