Vijayawada: Telugu Desam MLA from Denduluru constituency in West Godavari district, Chintamaneni Prabhakar, has the most number of cases of electoral malpractice pending against him — a whopping 74 in the last five years in both Telugu-speaking states. Next are two MLAs from Telangana, Jupally Krishna Rao and Gangula Kamalakar, with 23 charges against each of them. An analysis of the declared cases related to electoral malpractices by MLAs done by Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) and National Election Watch (NEW), non-partisan, non-governmental organisations, found that 44 MLAs from the southern states had declared cases of election malpractices.
Out of the 44, five are from Andhra Pradesh and six from Telangana state. Dhulipala Narendra with seven charges, Vasupalli Ganesh Kumar with four charges, Damacharla Janardhan Rao with seven charges, and G.V. Anjaneyulu with seven charges are the other MLAs from Andhra Pradesh.
From Telangana, MLAs Paila Sekhar Reddy has one charge of election malpractice against him, D.K. Aruna has three, Konda Surekha has five, and Jogu Ramanna has six. ADR and NEW have also analysed the election expenditure and vote share of 907 out of 922 MLAs from the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana state, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and the Union Territory of Puducherry.
Only MLAs from Kerala have spent more than 50 per cent of the expenditure limit. Most of the expense has been incurred on transport, with only eight per cent being spent on print and electronic media in the last five years (2013-2018).
Telangana MLAs’ average election expenditure was Rs 12.63 lakh and the average expenditure by Andhra Pradesh MLAs stood at Rs 12.84 lakh. An analysis of the vote share revealed that among the southern states Andhra Pradesh has the highest vote share by an elected government at 49.9 per cent while Telangana has the lowest, at 43.3 per cent.
