Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Representation of The People Act 1951
The Representation of The People Act 1951
www.visionias.in
Vision IAS
1. INTRODCUTION
The founding fathers of India opted for a Parliamentary democracy as the appropriate model for a large
and diverse country like ours. Conducted once in a five year, general election of India is an attempt in the
direction.
THE REPRESENTATION OF THE PEOPLE ACT, 1951 is a model Act which provides the legislative
framework for:
Election Commission (EC), a constitutional body, is assigned to take the mammoth exercise of conducting
general elections under the act. The code of conduct is developed by the commission for carrying the
elections in fair manner. However, the elections are marred with several issues, a few of which are as
identified:
bureaucracy and politicians has come out clearly in various parts of the country and that some political
leaders become the leaders of these gangs/armed senas and over the years get themselves elected to local
bodies, State assemblies, and national parliament.
A number of remedies have been proposed by the various committees on the criminalization of politics in
the country.
www.visionias.in
Vision IAS
www.visionias.in
Vision IAS
lakh for an Assembly seat. The funding limits are revised by EC over a period of time. It is also
recommended that the govt. should establish a national corpus for elections funding.
www.visionias.in
Vision IAS
with a unique bar-coded ID number, assigned for life to avoid confusion over electoral rolls and the cost
associated. The Goswami Committee also recommended that Post Offices should be the agencies for
preparation and maintenance of electoral rolls.
three times
consecutively.
www.visionias.in
Vision IAS
The Election Commission also recommends that the Secretariat of the Election Commission,
consisting of officers and staff at various levels is also insulated from the interference of the
Executive in the matter of their appointments, promotions, etc. All such functions are exclusively
vested in the Election Commission on the lines of the Secretariats of the Lok Sabha, and Rajya
Sabha, Registries of the Supreme Court and High Courts etc.
The third recommendation of the Election Commission is that its budget be treated as Charged on
the Consolidated Fund of India.
www.visionias.in
Vision IAS
The consequence is that a bye-election would be required from one constituency which apart from involving
avoidable labour and expenditure on the conduct of that bye-election. The commission recommends that a
person cannot contest from more than one constituency at a time.
Vision IAS
www.visionias.in
Vision IAS
petition on a day to day basis. In practice, however, cases involving election petitions are rarely resolved in
a timely manner. NCRWC recommended that special election benches designated for election petitions only
should be formed in the High Court. Special Election Tribunals should be constituted at the regional level
under to ensure speedy disposal of election petitions and disputes within a stipulated period of six months.
10
www.visionias.in
Vision IAS
3.5 Mizoram
Assembly constituencies were redrawn in 2008 based on the orders of the Delimitation Commission. The
Commission reduced the seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes (STs) in Mizoram from 39 to 38 out of a total
of 40 seats. This Bill reverses the number of reserved seats for STs back to 39.