Direct cash transfer schemes, freebies on eve of polls comes under SC scanner

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued notices to the central government and half a dozen states on a petition that sought to ban any direct cash transfers to voters just ahead of polls. Rolling out of any such scheme, the public interest litigation argued, should happen at least six months before elections.

A bench led by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi issued the notices on a plea by a contestant in the recent elections, from the Eluru parliamentary constituency in Andhra Pradesh. Pentapati Pulla Rao claimed that he had witnessed first-hand misuse of public money to bribe voters under the guise of welfare schemes.

He cited Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi, which offers Rs 6,000 a year to farmers, and the cash-transfer schemes of six state governments and said those were announced just before polls. The states he named were Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Jharkhand, Karnataka and West Bengal.


His case was argued by senior advocate Santosh Paul and lawyer Shravan Kumar. Referring to an earlier top court ruling, the petitioner said though promises in an election manifesto could not be construed as corrupt practice under the Representation of the People Act, the reality was that distribution of any freebies undoubtedly influenced people.

“It shakes the root of free and fair elections to a large degree,” he argued. Though the Election Commission broadly held such a view, the commission said it lacked power to frame guidelines to regulate or crackdown on last-minute schemes. The petitioner said the commission’s decision allowing a direct cash-transfer scheme announced just ahead of the Telangana elections in 2018, despite objections of the opposition, had motivated others to introduce similar programmes.

This is in gross violation of Article 14 and 21 of the Constitution as this denies equal participation for all the citizens in polity, he argued. He claimed that such schemes technically amounted to bribes as they were implemented during the election process without budgetary allocations.