A Melting Pot of Action: Why India's Election Commission Must Be Strengthened Now

In the world's largest democracy, one institution stands between the idea of self-rule and its practice: the Election Commission of India. Every five years, nearly a billion citizens — richer and poorer, literate and unlettered, from a Himalayan hamlet to a Mumbai high-rise — are asked to trust that their single vote will be counted exactly as cast, alongside hundreds of millions of others, and that the result will be honoured by whoever loses. No army enforces this trust; only an institution's credibility does. That the Commission has, for most of its history, earned this trust is one of independent India's quieter miracles. That trust is now being tested is why this moment — a season of genuine achievement shadowed by genuine doubt — is exactly the right time to strengthen it, deliberately and visibly, rather than merely defend it.

A decade of extraordinary administration

Consider the scale the Commission has managed since 2014. India's electorate grew from approximately 83.41 crore voters that year to 97.98 crore by 2024 — an increase larger than the population of most countries — while the 2024 general election alone saw 64.64 crore votes cast across 10,52,664 polling stations. Behind each ordinary polling booth lay an extraordinary logistical feat: electronic voting machines transported by road, rail, helicopter and, in the Northeast, on foot and by boat; polling personnel trained and deployed; security coordinated across states; and votes counted under strict, auditable procedure — all compressed into weeks, for a country of India's scale and diversity.

This achievement was carried forward by a succession of Chief Election Commissioners, each inheriting the last one's standards and adding to them. V.S. Sampath presided over the landmark 2014 general election; H.S. Brahma, Nasim Zaidi, A.K. Joti and O.P. Rawat followed in succession. Sunil Arora oversaw the 2019 general election — the largest in human history at the time — Sushil Chandra succeeded him, and Rajiv Kumar led the Commission through the 2024 exercise before Gyanesh Kumar assumed office in February 2025. Behind these names stand hundreds of thousands of state election officers, district magistrates and polling staff whose competence rarely makes headlines precisely because things worked.

Genuine reform accompanied this administration. Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail machines were deployed alongside EVMs from 2019, adding a physical check citizens could see with their own eyes. In 2024, nationwide home voting let elderly and disabled electors cast ballots without leaving home — the state honouring a promise that age or infirmity should never silence a citizen's political voice. Women's turnout came to exceed men's, and digital complaint channels gave citizens a direct line to report violations. These were not cosmetic changes; they made participation more genuinely universal.

The price of the world's largest democratic exercise

Running elections at this scale is expensive, and honesty about the figures matters. The Commission's own provisional government expenditure for the 2014 Lok Sabha election was approximately ₹3,870 crore. Separately, the Centre for Media Studies has estimated total election-related spending — encompassing parties, candidates and campaigns, not merely administration — at roughly ₹30,000 crore for 2014, ₹60,000 crore for 2019, and a projected ₹1.35 lakh crore for 2024. These figures are frequently conflated in public debate, but they measure different things: one is what it costs to administer a free and fair election; the other is what India's political ecosystem spends competing in one. Both deserve scrutiny — through transparent procurement and published accounts on the administrative side, and through serious political-finance reform on the other — but neither should be mistaken for the other. Prudence and integrity must advance together, because a poorly resourced Commission and an unregulated flow of political money are both, in their own way, threats to fairness.

Where the record has genuinely slipped: the SIR

Every institution's character is revealed most clearly in its hardest test, and the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls — the most sweeping roll-cleaning exercise in over two decades — has been exactly that test, and the results have been mixed. The purpose is legitimate: removing duplicate, deceased and shifted voters strengthens the roll's integrity, and the Supreme Court, in May 2026, upheld the SIR's legal legitimacy as within the Commission's constitutional mandate. But legitimacy of purpose has not translated smoothly into flawlessness of execution.

The shortcomings are concrete and documented. By September 2026, over 13 crore names had been excluded from draft rolls across the exercise's phases nationally — a figure that does not by itself establish how many were rightly removed versus wrongly excluded, but whose sheer size demanded rigorous, visible safeguards. In West Bengal, roughly 93% of appeals decided by mid-September resulted in restoration — a proportion so high that it suggests the initial exclusion process itself needs review, even accounting for officials' caution that stronger documentary cases were heard first. Goa's exclusion of 97 people later found eligible pointed to software and process errors rather than isolated human mistakes. Opposition parties have alleged far larger deletions — Trinamool Congress leaders have claimed tens of lakhs of names removed in West Bengal alone — and reporting has surfaced concerns that election commissioners themselves raised the process's pace and rigour with the Chief Election Commissioner multiple times over many months. Compounding the strain, booth-level officers working under extremely tight timelines faced severe stress, with opposition parties alleging dozens of deaths, several attributed to that pressure. The Commission has disputed specific allegations and published rebuttals and data, and it deserves credit for the doorstep-assistance and technical-review measures announced in late September 2026. But the controversy itself — including public calls for the Chief Election Commissioner's resignation from opposition leaders and youth movements alike — shows that process alone did not carry sufficient public confidence, and confidence, for an election body, is the entire product.

Why now is precisely the moment

This is the paradox worth naming plainly: the Commission's finest achievements and its most serious credibility crisis are occurring within the same decade, sometimes within the same year. That paradox is not a reason for despair; it is the precise argument for urgent, structural strengthening. A young institution taking its first steps has time to mature slowly. An institution as decorated as the ECI, facing its sharpest scrutiny in years, has no such luxury — every subsequent election will be measured against the standard this controversy sets.

The reform agenda is not mysterious. Appointment processes for Election Commissioners should inspire cross-partisan confidence. Roll-revision exercises need realistic timelines, transparent published criteria, accessible correction mechanisms, and independent audit — not defensive rebuttal alone. Booth-level officers need manageable workloads and genuine support, not impossible deadlines treated as an administrative afterthought. Every disputed number — deletions, restorations, deaths, appeals — deserves an independently verifiable answer, published promptly, because ambiguity is what allegations feed on. Above all, the Commission must treat this season of protest not as an attack to be weathered but as a catalyst to be used: the loudest possible signal that renewal, from the booth level upward, cannot wait for the next controversy to force it.

India's electorate will only keep growing, and Indian democracy's global example carries real weight for other nations navigating their own fragile transitions of power. The Commission built a genuinely remarkable record over the past decade under a line of capable Chief Election Commissioners. The finest tribute to that inheritance is not a defense of past success but an honest, urgent renewal — so that the next election is not merely conducted, but trusted, by every citizen who stands in line to cast a vote that is rightfully, unquestionably theirs.