Poll: Insufficient funds plague new outfits

Barely a month after newly-formed political parties took on themselves to give power to the people and encourage citizens participation in democracy,lack of funds has come in the way of realising their dreams.

Barely a month after newly-formed political parties took on themselves to give power to the people and encourage citizens participation in democracy,lack of funds has come in the way of realising their dreams. Political parties like Jago Party,Professionals Party of India (PPI) and the Lok Satta party unanimously agreed that gathering funds for lesser known parties and getting visibility amongst a plethora of political parties seem to be their big challenges ahead of elections.

Collecting funds has become a very serious problem for us. It is difficult to digest the fact that people in this city cannot even chip a meagre amount of Rs 500. They clearly dont want to put their money where their mouth is, said environment activist-turned-politician Rishi Aggarwal,who will be contesting from North-west Mumbai for the Jago party.

The Jago party for the last one month has done massive door-to-door campaigning and fund collecting exercise in their constituency. For candidates like me,credibility is the only selling point. When we undertook our door-to-door campaign,we went to each house and made sure that they question us on everything. I gave them a copy of my work. Only after they were convinced of our cause,they gave us donation, said Aggarwal. However,he admits that the results have been far from desirous. The ceiling for election expenses prescribed by the Election Commission is Rs 25 lakh. This much amount is needed by any party to get visibility. But so far we have only collected some where between Rs 75 000 and 80,000, said Aggarwal.

According to Aggarwal,the collected money is utilized for basic transportation,volunteers,running the back hand office of the party,telecom etc. Candidates like me can only succeed if there is high voltage visibility but funds remain the main challenge for us, said Aggarwal.

Lack of funds has forced NGO-turned-political party,Lok Satta Party to withdraw from the upcoming elections in Mumbai. Of the prescribed amount by the Election Commission,we were only able to collect Rs 5 lakh through door-to-door campaigning. For the present elections,we are only concentrating in Andhra Pradesh, said Surendra Srivastav,the partys state president.

According to him,the main reason why new parties cannot garner funds is because of lack of peoples acceptance. We realised that people were angry following the 26/11 attacks,But that anger has died down with time. In December,when we had planned to actively enter politics,the move was welcomed by the people. But now,this anger seems to have settle down and the support we were shown then has not been translated into funds, said Srivastava.

Despite this backlog,Srivastava is hopeful that by the next Assembly elections they would have made some impact. At present,we will only look after Andhra Pradesh. Hopefully,after seeing our work there we will be recognized all over the country. By next elections,we will also do our campaigning with more precision and tact. Hopefully citizens will also be ready for cleaner politicians, Srivastava added.

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The PPI party also admits that funding challenges are obvious. We are getting small donations from large number of community groups. There is also NRI funding which is coming in good number, said Girish Deshpande,core member of PPI. But since our target audience is the urban middle class who cannot be appeased with freebies,we are relying heavily on sweat equity part of the candidates, said Despande. Their candidates like Rajendra Thacker and Dr Mona Shah are heavily into door-to-door campaigning. The response of seeing a new political consciousness is there and we are using it to out benefit by putting our candidates directly on the field, said Deshpande.

Despite this kind of response,the new political parties are definitely feeling the heat of hard core marketing. Unfortunately,at the end it is hard marketing which does the trick and bring in visibility and funds. This is one benefit which new parties like us clearly dont have and we definitely feel unfortunate, said Aggarwal.

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Poll: Insufficient funds plague new outfits

Barely a month after newly-formed political parties took on themselves to give power to the people and encourage citizens participation in democracy,lack of funds has come in the way of realising their dreams.

Barely a month after newly-formed political parties took on themselves to give power to the people and encourage citizens participation in democracy,lack of funds has come in the way of realising their dreams.