Facts about India elections Tuesday, April 20, 2004 Posted: 0451 GMT (1251 HKT)
NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- Some key facts about India's three-week parliamentary elections, which begin Tuesday:
-- Parliamentary elections in India, a country of 1.02 billion people, are the world's largest.
-- They are held every five years, unless a government loses its majority.
-- Polling will be in five phases April 20-May 10.
-- There are more than 660 million registered voters. Some 4 million officials, police officers and soldiers will take part.
-- For the first time in an Indian election, all voters are to use electronic voting machines to save paper, tackle vote fraud and make results quicker.
-- The voters will elect 543 members to the Lok Sabha (People's Assembly), the lower house of Parliament.
-- Counting begins May 13. The expected date for final results is not known because violence, intimidation and ballot-box theft in some areas requires re-balloting.
-- The main rivals are Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's multiparty National Democratic Alliance, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, and an alliance headed by the Congress party of Sonia Gandhi.
-- Development is the main issue in the campaign, unlike the last two elections when divisive religion and caste-based disputes drove the political agenda. Vajpayee is also hoping to gain from his peace initiatives with archrival Pakistan.
-- The government claims "India is shining," and that an economic boom is changing the lives of citizens. Vajpayee is pledging to turn India into a developed nation by 2020.
-- The opposition says the prosperity is limited to cities and hasn't touched the lives of people in villages, where most Indian live. A third of Indians live on less than a dollar a day.
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