2024: India's Democratic Elections

As we're in the midst of the largest democratic elections in history, here are a few interesting facts:

1. The 2024 election will be the largest democratic exercise in history. India has the most expensive elections in the world, surpassing even the United States. In 2019, parties and candidates spent an estimated $8.7 billion to woo more than 900 million eligible voters.

2. There are over 945 million eligible voters in India

3. The votes are cast electronically across more than a million polling stations that require about 15 million employees during balloting

4. India’s electoral rules say there must be a polling station within 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) of every habitation.

This means many of India’s 11 million election workers must trek across glaciers, deserts, jungles, and an ocean to make sure every eligible Indian can vote.

For instance, the sole inhabitant of the remote Gir National Park in Gujarat, home to the last free-ranging Asiatic lions, has his own polling station complete with his own electronic voting machine, because there are no paper ballots for in-person voting.

5. Roughly 25 percent of seats are constitutionally reserved for members hailing from one of two disadvantaged communities: Scheduled Castes (SC), also known as Dalits, and Scheduled Tribes (ST), India’s tribal peoples or Adivasis. 

6. Of the 514 sittings MPs in the 17th Lok Sabha, at least 225 have declared their involvement in criminal cases, as per analysis by the non-governmental organisation Association of Democratic Reforms. That is 44% of the total number of sitting legislators.

7. Celebrity MPs performed poorly compared to the national average for MPs in this current Lok Sabha on attendance, debate participation, number of questions asked, and bills introduced. Names in the list with low attendance are Hindi actor Ajay Singh Deol alias Sunny Deol (17%), Bengali actress and singer Mimi Chakraborty (21%), Bengali actress Nusrat Jahan Ruhi (39%), singer Hans Raj Hans (39%), Hindi actress Kirron Kher (47%), and actress Hema Malini (50%). Former India cricketer Gautam Gambhir logged 61% attendance.

Read more:

- ADR's Lok Sabha report: https://adrindia.org/content/lok-sabha-elections-2024

- ThePrint report in celebrity MPs: https://theprint.in/feature/hema-malini-to-dev-adhikari-theprint-report-card-on-celeb-mp-performance/2045998/