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Cash, liquor, drugs, precious metals and other freebies worth Rs.1,760 crore – a seven-fold increase compared to the 2018 elections – have been seized by authorities in the five states that have gone to polls this month, the Election Commission of India said on Monday.
Authorities in Mizoram, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where polling has concluded, and Rajasthan and Telangana, where polling is scheduled for November 25 and November 30 respectively, had made seizures of Rs.239.15 crore during the 2018 elections.
Since the announcement of elections this time, on October 9, seizures of Rs.372.9 crore cash, Rs.214.8 crore worth of liquor, Rs.245.3 crore worth of drugs, Rs.371.2 crore worth of precious metals and Rs.556.02 crore worth of other freebies had been made so far. Out of the five states, Telangana and Rajasthan accounted for the majority of seizures – Rs.659.2 crore and Rs.650.7 crore respectively, the EC statement said.
The EC said seizures of freebies in the past six Assembly elections – Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Tripura and Karnataka – was Rs.1,413.19 crore, a huge increase from the previous round of elections in those states when the total seizures were worth Rs.127.41 crore.
The EC said the monitoring process had begun in June, when senior officials visited the states to sensitise the authorities about the importance of expenditure monitoring. From the time of the visits till the announcement of elections in October, the enforcement agencies had already made seizures worth Rs.576.20 crore, the EC said. The EC had appointed 228 officers as expenditure observers and named 194 constituencies as “expenditure sensitive constituencies” for close monitoring.
