Activist alerts EC over missing expenditure information

On Thursday, an

Ahmedabad based RTI activist

Santosh Rathod travelled to Delhi to submit his grievance at Nirvachan Bhavan — the chief election commissioner’s office. He red-flagged to the ECI that many Lok Sabha candidates across 91 constituencies in 18 states in the first phase of the general election had not filed their mandatory day-today expenditures with their respective state office of ECI, which were to be uploaded on the websites. Rathod returned to

Gujarat

and on Friday looked up the Gujarat-CEO website and found that in the morning just two constituencies had uploaded the expenditure information.


“The whole purpose of ‘Election Expenditure Monitoring’ will be lost if timely information is not provided to citizens so that they could in turn help call the bluff of politicians,” says Rathod. He adds, “The election watchdog has to upload three inspection reports for each candidate on its website in each state before the polls are held.”


Rathod visited zilla panchayat office at Lal Darwaza at 4pm to inspect the expenditure of Ahmedabad (West) Lok Sabha candidates. “I found that till 4pm on Friday only three constituencies —Ahmedabad West, Ahmedabad East and a central Gujarat constituency had candidates’ expenditure uploaded. After I had raised the issue with the election offices more constituencies uploaded the information.”

Rathod adds that the returning officer for each constituency is duty bound to provide access to expenditure inspection reports.