NEW DELHI: MLAs from only 11 states have spent more than half of their prescribed election expenditure and most of the spending has been done on procuring and arranging vehicles for campaign, an Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) report revealed on Monday.
The Election Commission has prescribed election expenditure in two categories. The larger states are allotted Rs 28 lakh whereas small states are given Rs 20 lakh as election expenditure.
ADR analysed 4,087 sitting legislators out of the total 4,120. MLAs from Karnataka and Meghalaya were not analysed. The report also found that the least expenditure incurred was on campaign in electronic and print media - five per cent.
Vote share analysis of parties forming the governments in states showed that no winning party or alliance had managed to secure more than 55 per cent of the vote share. Among all the states, the government in Arunachal was formed with the winning combination securing 53 per cent of the votes, the highest while in Jharkhand; it was the lowest with 31.2 per cent. Only five states elected governments with a 50 per cent vote share. Of the 128 legislators that declared cases against them relating to electoral malpractices, 74 per cent won with a vote share of above 40 per cent. Bihar with 38 such MLAs had the maximum number.
The top three states in terms of electoral expenditure were Kerala, Gujarat and Uttarakhand with Rs19.64 lakh, Rs 16.45 lakh and Rs 16.19 lakh, respectively. In the bottom three were Nagaland with Rs 7.24 lakh, Puducherry with Rs 5.02 lakh and Mizoram with Rs 4.38 lakh. In terms of percentage expenditure Kerala, Gujarat and Uttarakhand stood as the top three while Jammu and Kashmir, Goa and Manipur were the bottom three.