Details scrutinised through Right to Information (RTI) Act on money spent to conduct elections in Madurai South Assembly constituency in 2016 has indicated widespread irregularities, particularly in the form of inflated expenditure and bills from reportedly non-existent business entities.
K. Hakkim, a Madurai-based RTI activist, recently obtained permission through the Act to see the expenditure records maintained at Madurai Corporation Zone 3’s Assistant Commissioner Office, who acted as the Returning Officer (RO) of the constituency. “I was shown only the accounts for ₹ 41.03 lakh spent directly under the control of RO under one of the eight heads of accounts maintained for election expenditure. For other expenditure, I was asked to approach Collector’s office,” he said. The glaring things that got Mr. Hakkim’s attention in perusing the roughly 2,600- page document, of which he managed to get copies of 334 pages, were the expenditures on fuel and vehicles, flex banners, postcards and food items.
Stating that ₹ 25.87 lakh was spent on salaries for 2,418 personnel deployed on election duty, he said that another considerable chunk of ₹ 6.69 lakh was spent on fuel for government vehicles or renting private vehicles. “Even if you apply a rough calculation of ₹ 10 per kilometre, which is the usual rent charged by vehicles, the officials seem to have travelled 66,900 km while the whole constituency is just around 10 to 15 square kilometre,” he said.
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Similarly, he said that ₹ 1.06 lakh was spent on providing water cans, chairs and tubelights in the 213 polling booths located in 56 locations on the election day, which comes to an average of ₹ 500 per booth. “Since most booths are located in schools, expectation is that chairs and tubelights would already be available. If so, why ₹ 500 for one or two water cans,” he asked.
Importantly, he alleged that at least three shops, from which bills were obtained to the tune of ₹ 80,000 for printing flex banners, papers, post ards and stamps, which were reportedly bought for Systematic Voters’ Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) awareness campaign, were non-existent.
“Postcards and stamps would ideally be bought from post offices. However, postcards and stamps worth ₹ 10,000 were bought from a seemingly non-existent stationery shop,” he said, adding that ₹ 1 lakh was spent on hiring LED televisions, for which only a hand-written voucher was available.
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Similarly, he pointed to ₹ 2 lakh spent on flex banners, ₹ 24,000 for making a polling booth as model polling booth, and ₹ 22,500 as salary for those deployed in booths to push wheelchairs for physically-challenged voters, which sounded unreasonable.
“This is only a fraction of the expenditure in just one of the 234 constituencies in Tamil Nadu. My RTI requests to obtain expenditure at State and District level are being stalled. A thorough audit and investigation is required,” he said.
A senior official associated with District Election Office in the Collectorate during election said that audits of election expenditure was conducted at three different levels — by the Local Fund Audit office in district, then by the audit wing of Chief Electoral Officer in the State, and finally by the Accountant General’s office.
The officer acknowledged that the CEO’s office has already raised objections for lakhs of rupees spent in 10 constituencies in the district, particularly those coming under Madurai Corporation.