The Commission has proposed new criteria to assess parties' constitution, internal management and electoral participation.
What you should know
The Election Commission is going to conduct a self-evaluation of the political parties. For this, the Commission has prepared a draft of 'Political Party Self-Evaluation Procedure', in which various indicators and scores have been proposed for the evaluation of parties.
The draft proposed a score of 8 for organizational structure, 22 for internal management and 15 for team responsibilities. Similarly, 10 points have been assigned for gender and inclusive system, 20 points for important aspects like fund management and audit, 15 points for participation and representation in elections and 10 points for other political systems.
During the self-assessment, the Commission will look in detail whether the parties have/have not complied with the statutes and laws. Under this, issues such as the formation of central, state and local level committees, the periodic election of office bearers every five years and the state of parliamentary party formation will form the basis of evaluation as mentioned in the party constitution.
Internal management will look at membership updates and regular meetings, while for financial transparency aspects such as party's separate fund, bank account operation, support above 25 thousand rupees taken/not taken from the banking system and whether or not the source of donations of more than 1 lakh will be checked.
Apart from this, the qualification specified for the officials and whether/not publicizing the details of the party through the website will also be included in the evaluation.
According to Commission officials, the main objective of this system is to streamline the internal procedures of political parties and make their functioning transparent and accountable. They say that the procedure will be finalized after collecting suggestions from all stakeholders.
