The idea of ‘One Nation One Election’ is premised on flimsy grounds of cost savings, policy paralysis, governance interference and, now, the shiny new claim of boosting economic growth.
Praveen Chakravarty
March 14, 2024
Using this method, technically called difference-in-difference, to analyse six out of the thirty-six states in India, the Kovind Committee report makes the bold claim that ONOE can boost economic growth by 1.5 per cent points. (Express file photo)
It is well known that India’s expenditure on health and education is abysmally low vis-à-vis desired levels. The oft-cited reason is the lack of resources. There is now a new idea to resolve this fiscal dilemma — “one nation one election”. If India forcibly adopts simultaneous elections, then India’s GDP will magically rise to the extent of “half of the annual health expenditure or one-third of the education budget”. This is the claim of the “High-Level Committee Report on Simultaneous Elections” (page 161) chaired by former President Ram Nath Kovind. If you find this claim intriguing at best and ludicrous at worst, you are justified in feeling so.
The One Nation One Election (ONOE) balloon arguing for a constitutional amendment to hold concurrent elections to the Union and states was first floated in 2016. The argument was that India is in perennial election mode, with an election being held either in one of the states or the Union every year which renders it costly, distracts from governance and puts pressure on government functioning. These have been consistently rebutted as fallacious arguments, with facts and evidence by many experts and commentators. Eight years later, this balloon is still hovering around the skies of Delhi, pulled higher now by the string of the Ram Nath Kovind Committee report. This time, the balloon has also been painted an economic colour. Apparently, not only will ONOE generate monetary savings (a paltry five rupees per voter), but it will also lead to higher GDP growth for the nation. To make this seemingly strange argument sound credible, there is also a precise number that the report cites for the expected increase in GDP growth from simultaneous elections — 1.5 per cent of GDP or 4.5 trillion rupees or roughly fifty billion dollars.
This staggering claim is based on a research paper by economists N K Singh and Prachi Mishra. The research paper is evidently not published in any scholarly journal but prepared seemingly only for the Kovind panel. To put it simplistically, the paper analyses the change in the GDP growth rate of a state between one year after an election and one year before. It also identifies if the state election was held simultaneously with a national election or not. It then compares such changes in GDP growth between disparate and simultaneous elections. For this analysis, it chooses six states — Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Jharkhand and Odisha — that have had spurts of disparate and simultaneous elections between 1982-2023. Apparently, the difference in GDP growth rates between the year after an election and the year before can be explained by the type of election, simultaneous or disparate! Using this method, technically called difference-in-difference, to analyse six out of the thirty-six states in India, the Kovind Committee report makes the bold claim that ONOE can boost economic growth by 1.5 per cent points. It is for good reason that this paper is not published in any reputed scholarly journal and perhaps never will be. It is as laughable as measuring how much taller a child has grown in time periods when both parents were involved in parenting vis-à-vis just one parent to make a grand recommendation of the better parenting style!
What is even more audacious is that the paper uses the same dubious methodology to claim that simultaneous elections lower inflation, improve educational outcomes, reduce crimes and increase quality government expenditure. The hypothesis is that concurrent elections reduce economic uncertainty, improve teacher absenteeism and yield more efficient deployment of paramilitary forces to explain the findings. In short, the paper’s main claim is that the fewer the elections, the better India’s economy and society. In which case, how about doing away with elections altogether, like China, which has argued for long that electoral democracies are a hindrance to economic development? It is foolhardy to indulge in a blind pursuit of governance efficiency and economic growth at the cost of federalism and unity of a large, diverse and fractious nation such as ours.
“One nation, one election” is a politically unfeasible, administratively unworkable and constitutionally unviable proposition. The idea is premised on flimsy and shallow grounds of cost savings, policy paralysis, governance interference and, now, the shiny new claim of boosting economic growth. The ONOE idea is symbolic of the archetypical ideological divide between the BJP’s “India is a uniform nation and polity” versus the INDIA bloc’s “India is a union of diverse states and polities”. Those who believe in the real India will never seek to shoehorn it into a deranged fantasy of unitarism dressed up as efficiency.
True to the style of academics, the Singh-Mishra research paper has an important caveat buried deep inside in technical jargon that seeks to caution readers to not read too much into these findings and interpret them as causal inferences. In other words, the authors have a disclaimer of a few lines in a 600-page report warning against taking their recommendations too seriously. In 2003, the World Health Organisation released a framework for tobacco product makers which required them to carry a health warning of the size of a minimum of 30 per cent and a recommended 50 per cent of the front and the back of the product package. This helped reduce tobacco-related deaths by a third across the world. It is perhaps time that scholars are also subject to such conventions for displaying their caveats and disclaimers in big, bold font at the beginning of the research paper to minimise disastrous consequences for nations and societies through foolish policies recommended by research papers.