IT majors can monitor real poll spend by parties as their CSR

In a remarkable turn of events, the most-resource-starved, youngest party of all, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is revealed to have spent the most in the Gurgaon Lok Sabha constituency. The reported figures show that AAP’s Rs 56.37-lakh expenditure is 65 per cent higher than the BJP’s and 79 per cent higher than the Congress’ reported expenditure. This is hard to believe.

AAP’s claim that other parties have spent several times the legal limit but have underreported their expenditure is far more credible. Given the kind of money the major parties, BJP and Congress, spend on their vehicle convoys, on leaders’ travel by helicopters, planes and fancy sports utility vehicles, on campaign material such as posters and pamphlets, on rally venues, on mobilising people for rallies and on advertising on hoardings, TV, print and online media, it is difficult to accept that they have spent as little as they claim to have, in a high-profile contest such as Gurgaon’s.

These parties are able to get away with such cursory expenditure details because the Election Commission lacks institutional capacity to verify such claims with independent data monitoring of its own. This lack of capacity is not difficult to remedy. It should be possible to develop a cloud-based, crowd-sourced system of monitoring election expenditure by different parties under a variety of heads.

Let India’s information technology majors take up development and deployment of such election expenditure monitoring software as their corporate social responsibility. An active and expanded Election Commission can then gather data on diverse election campaign activity and impute realistic costs, and arrive at a more realistic total expenditure, even if this excludes money spent on cash and liquor distribution on election eve.

Once such data is gathered, the next step is to ask the parties to show source of income to finance such expenditure. Parties can be made to record even tiny contributions by individuals, a random sample of which can be taken up for verification. It is high time we brought transparency to poll spending.