32% BPL families in Gujarat take bribe for voting, says a survey report.
They may be among India’s best performing states, but when it comes to elections, a very large number of voters in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu take bribes to vote. So says the Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies (CMS).
The situation is hardly any better in prosperous states like Gujarat and Maharashtra, where 24% and 13% general category voters, respectively, take money to cast their votes, while among the below poverty line (BPL) households the figure is 32% for both states.
Similar bribery is endemic in areas of influence of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the study indicates. States ruled by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) fare slightly better.
However, similar corruption is least in states governed by the Left, says the survey conducted among 41,000 voters in 19 states and billed as the first-ever empirical study on cash for votes. The bribe taking voters also come from all sections of society: urban and rural, the poor and not-so-poor, as well as the educated and the barely literate, says CMS.
“Even in Delhi, 25%of the voters received money for their vote,” says the CMS survey. The study took a sample size of 18,000 voters in 19 states in 2008 and 23,000 households belonging to the below poverty line (BPL) category in 2007. It did not cover other inducements like liquor or freebies for votes and focussed only on the assembly and Lok Sabha elections. The national average of people who took cash to cast their votes was found to be 22% in the general category and 37% in BPL families.
Some percentages are alarming. In Andhra Pradesh, 94% of BPL category voters had accepted money to vote, followed by Tamil Nadu with 78%, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh with 73%, Assam with 56% and Orissa with 50%.
In the general category, Karnataka topped the list with 47%, followed by Tamil Nadu 34%, Madhya Pradesh, 33, and Andhra Pradesh and Bihar 31% each.
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