Call meet on poll funds: West Bengal CM to PM

KOLKATA: Chief minister Mamata Banerjee has urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to call an all-party meeting to solely discuss public funding of elections so that the electoral exercise can be cleansed of corruption.


In her letter written on Thursday, Banerjee has mentioned that her party has been flagging this issue since 2014. The letter came a day after a team of Trinamool MPs called on Modi seeking to change

West Bengal’s name to Bangla

.

In support of her demand in the letter, Banerjee has mentioned that as many as 65 countries have adopted public funding of elections.

She has argued that

spiralling election expenditure

in the country, which exceeds that of Presidential and Congressional elections in the US, prompted her to broach the issue. Her letter refers to a recently published report called ‘Poll Expenditure, the 2019 Elections’, released by premier research organisation Centre for Media Studies, that states a minimum Rs 60,000 crore was spent during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The report estimates that Rs 700 per vote was spent and, on an average, nearly Rs 100 crore per Lok Sabha constituency was spent in these elections.

The CM further pointed out that political parties have access to free media in as many as 71 countries whereas in India, free broadcasting and television time for parties is restricted to All India Radio and Doordarshan.

Banerjee has written that direct funding of political parties is an important step towards poll reforms. She quoted Centre for Media Studies chairman N Bhaskara Rao, who has observed that spiralling poll expenditure is the “mother of all corruption”.