One nation, one election: The reform India cannot defer any longer

The choice before India is not between democracy and development. It is between a democracy aligned with its aspirations and one that is not. That alignment begins, though it does not end, with this reform

A democracy that is perpetually distracted cannot deliver desired development.

There is a peculiar kind of paralysis that visits the world’s largest democracy with clockwork regularity. It does not announce itself. It simply settles-quietly, methodically-over the machinery of the Indian state every few months. It happens as yet another election cycle begins somewhere across its thirty-six states and union territories. Executive decisions are deferred. Files move with greater caution. Senior bureaucrats are shifted en masse. Political leaders trade governance for rallies. And a nation attempting one of the most consequential structural transformations in modern economic history shifts into a lower gear-not by choice, but by design.

This is the hidden cost of India’s staggered electoral calendar. And it is a cost the country can no longer afford as it grapples with enormous challenges in meeting the rising aspirations of its young population amid turbulent global times.

The architecture of interruption

India’s founding fathers bestowed upon us a synchronised electoral democracy. From 1951 through 1967, Lok Sabha and state assembly elections were held simultaneously. That synchronisation unravelled progressively-through premature dissolutions of state assemblies between 1968 and 1971 and through subsequent constitutional developments-producing the fragmented, rolling electoral calendar that characterises Indian polity today. The negative consequences have compounded with each passing decade.

Between 2019 and 2024, elections were conducted across nearly every major Indian state, at different times, triggering the Model Code of Conduct (MCC). The constitutionally mandated MCC, necessary for free and fair elections, typically extends for six to eight weeks for each election, redirecting policy attention and pausing administrative action. Multiplied across a near-continuous cycle of state polls, its cumulative effect can be structural, substantial, and often irreversible.

The financial dimension reinforces this picture. The Centre for Media Studies, in its 2024 assessment, estimated that India’s general elections that year involved total expenditure of approximately Rs 1.35 lakh crore (USD 8 billion), making it the most expensive democratic exercise in recorded history. Aggregated across five years of state elections, local body polls, and by-elections, the cumulative figure rises manifold. Yet even this understates the true cost. The higher cost lies in the compounding drag of deferred decisions, delayed projects, and long-horizon planning repeatedly subordinated to the short-term imperatives of the electoral cycle. Every election also triggers a cycle of freebies and quid pro quo, which is inimical to good governance.

India, at this juncture, should be attempting a structural leap across multiple dimensions of development. The capital expenditure budget of the Centre and states has grown by 100 per cent between 2020 and 2025. This record outlay of Rs 11 lakh crore in the FY27 budget, largely on infrastructure, should ideally not be subject to unpredictable interruptions caused by recurring elections. Such investments require sustained monitoring, multi-year financing certainty, and uninterrupted institutional attention. A governance model that enters election mode four to six times a year is, by its very architecture, incompatible with that requirement.

The clearest illustration of this governance disruption, caused by repeated elections, is perhaps the still incomplete railway freight corridors — the West to East and the Delhi to Mumbai projects-which have been ongoing for the past 18 years. The projects were approved by the Cabinet in 2006. Changes in government at the Centre and in the intervening states have delayed the clearing of bottlenecks in land acquisition and other constraints. In the meantime, project costs have ballooned from roughly Rs 28,181 crore (initial sanction in 2008 for EDFC and WDFC) to over Rs 81,459 crore by 2015. The opportunity cost of congested tracks, delays in freight movement, and revenue loss can hardly be estimated. Several such examples abound. It is time to restrain the currently prevalent ultra-hyper democracy that vitiates optimal policy design and timely project execution. No single government is responsible for this pattern. The structure is. And that structural gap is precisely what needs to change.

The High-Level Committee on Simultaneous Elections, chaired by former President Ram Nath Kovind, which submitted its unanimous report to the Government in March 2024, frames One Nation One Election (ONOE) not as an administrative convenience but as a governance imperative. Drawing on inputs from constitutional experts, administrative bodies, and over forty-seven political parties, the Committee recommends a phased transition-aligning state electoral cycles with the Lok Sabha over a defined period, with appropriate constitutional provisions to manage synchronisation where needed.

The widely expressed concerns about federalism are legitimate and deserve serious engagement. India’s states are constitutional entities, not administrative subdivisions. Their electorates have the right to hold state governments accountable on their own terms. Any reform that dilutes that right would be worse than the problem it seeks to solve.

But the Kovind Committee does not propose to dilute state sovereignty. It proposes to synchronise electoral timing. Every voter will retain their rights. Every state government will retain its constitutional mandate. Only the calendar changes. And that will enhance the capacity of the executive to address development challenges.

The argument for ONOE rests on a simple proposition: infrastructure projects and long-term programmes, interrupted repeatedly by election-induced pauses, will perform sub-optimally. The results are time overruns, inflated budgets, and administrative inertia. This should not be acceptable at a time when India must accelerate growth to achieve Viksit Bharat by 2047.

India’s ambitions are generational in scale. Its current electoral calendar is ultra-short-term, making it misaligned with development imperatives. It is an institutional design problem-one that compounds silently with every election cycle.

ONOE will not resolve all governance challenges. It is not a panacea. But it is a structural precondition for a democracy that seeks to plan and execute over sustained periods, rather than remain perpetually distracted by multiple electoral cycles.

The choice before India is not between democracy and development. It is between a democracy aligned with its aspirations and one that is not. That alignment begins, though it does not end, with this reform.

India’s ambitions are generational in scale. Its current electoral calendar is ultra-short-term, making it misaligned with development imperatives.

Rajiv Kumar, Chairman at Pahlé India Foundation; and Rajdeep Singh, Executive Assistant to the Leadership Office at Pahlé India Foundation; Views presented are personal.