Candidates spent Rs 775 crore in 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Shashi Tharoor highest spender among winners

Total spending by all candidates was the highest in Faridabad Lok Sabha constituency in Haryana and the lowest in North Goa

Candidates of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls declared to have spent over Rs 775 crore during campaigning. Shashi Tharoor of the Congress was the highest spender among the winners, followed by Tirath Singh Rawat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), according to a compilation of datasets released the Election Commission (EC) recently.

Total spending by all contesting candidates was highest in Faridabad Lok Sabha constituency in Haryana and the lowest in North Goa. Anantnag constituency in Jammu and Kashmir saw candidates spending most per voter, while Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh saw minimum spending per voter.

The limit of expenditure for a candidate contesting for a Lok Sabha seat was Rs 70 lakh for most states in 2019. Tharoor, who lapped up a hat-trick at Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, declared to have spent a little over Rs 69.94 lakh during campaigning, thus becoming the highest spender among the winners. He was closely followed by Rawat, who won from Garhwal in Uttarakhand, and declared to have spent Rs 69.85 lakh. P K Kunhalikutty of the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) spent Rs 69.82 lakh to win from Malappuram in Kerala.

Indra Hang Subba of the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha (SKM) was the lowest spender among the winners of the 2019 elections. Subba, a research scholar at the Sikkim University, spent just Rs 7.08 lakh in campaigning to win from the lone parliamentary constituency in the tiny state. He could have spent eight times more though, as the expenditure limit for Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and Goa was Rs 54 lakh in 2019.

Altogether, 8,054 candidates contested from 543 seats in the last parliamentary polls.

The candidates at Faridabad in Haryana together spent Rs 2.91 crore – the highest in terms of expenses by all contestants in a parliamentary constituency. The North Goa constituency saw the least money power as expenditure by all the candidates together was just a little over Rs 59.84 lakh.

However, in terms of expenses incurred by the candidates per voter (elector who actually voted), Anantnag in J&K topped the tally. The expenditure by all candidates made to woo each voter in the constituency was Rs 158.42. The candidates at the Chhindwara LS constituency in Madhya Pradesh spent the lowest amount – just Rs 4.91 – per voter, according to the “Atlas on General Elections 2019”, which was released by Chief Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra on Tuesday.

Rae Bareli and Amethi constituencies in Uttar Pradesh were among the ones which saw low expenditure by all candidates per voter. Rahul Gandhi of the Congress and Smriti Irani of the BJP as well as the candidates of other parties together declared to have spent a total of Rs 80.75 lakh with per voter expenses being Rs 8.56. Irani defeated Rahul, who, however, won from his second constituency Wayanad in Kerala. Sonia Gandhi and the candidates of other parties spent just Rs 8.26 in Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh for each elector. The total expenditure by all the candidates in Rae Bareli was just Rs 79.20 lakh.

“When administering elections of this scale and magnitude, it is imperative that the Election Management Body be equipped with an exhaustive dataset that empowers strategic interventions based on statistics,” Chandra said after releasing the book along with Election Commissioners Rajiv Kumar and Anup Pandey.