Lok Sabha elections may be held in April
Monday, 06/01/2014
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New Delhi : Nearly a month-long Lok Sabha elections are likely to be held between mid-April and early-May in five or six phases, highly-placed sources in the Election Commission said on Sunday.
The Election Commission has kick-started preparations for the elections with a directive to chief electoral officers to revise electoral rolls by February-end.
Elections to state assemblies of Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Sikkim will also be held along with the Lok Sabha exercise.
“The announcement of the poll schedule will be done in the last days of February or, at best, the first two-three days of March,” the sources said.
The poll watchdog will be holding a series of meeting in the next two months to firm up poll plans and is expected to announce poll dates in the first week of March.
Chief Election Commissioner, V S Sampath, recently said that the EC will ensure that the 16th Lok Sabha is constituted by June 1. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had, on Friday, told reporters that he would plan his post-LS polls future later and still had five more months left.
But, the tentative poll schedule gives him roughly a two-month window to deliver as the model code of conduct will come into force once the election dates are announced.
In these two months, the government will have to pass a law to carve out Telangana state and demonstrate its commitment to fight corruption.
Before the announcement for polls, the Lok Sabha may meet for one last time to pass a vote-on-account budget to enable expenditure for six months of the new fiscal year 2014-15 to give time for the new government to present a full-fledged budget in the next Parliament.
