After being mooted for over a decade, “One Nation, One Election” has for the first time a date on the calendar. The Joint Parliamentary Committee, which is examining the simultaneous bills, this week met in Goa for a two-day consultation and gave the impression that it is now operating in reverse, with the upcoming Lok Sabha poll as the deadline for India's staggered voting calendar to be synchronised. While addressing the reporters on the sidelines of the Goa session, the committee chairman P.P. Chaudhary said that the committee is not debating the desirability of the reform, but how to bring the change and added that several states could even be brought in line with one another's assembly timings if the political parties agree in advance.

That confidence is based on a figure the government has been repeating at almost every stop on its roadshow about ₹7 lakh crore, which Chaudhary says India loses every cycle, given that elections are never really over. The panel has been briefed by economists that poll synchronisation would boost GDP growth by at least 1.5 to 1.6 per cent, a figure which, if checked, is more than what most individual policy actions tried in India in recent times. The rationale behind this is simple: almost 5 crore workers leave factories and construction sites to vote in their native places for about a month ahead of every election, government teachers leave their classrooms to serve as polling agents and update voters' lists for several months during each election and bureaucrats assigned to carry out welfare schemes are diverted to election work, which slows down and hampers the process from infrastructure disbursals to GST collection drives. Sum up those interruptions in the 28 states and eight UTs that have elections every five years, and the numbers crunched by the committee imply that there is always some kind of election season in some part of India.

The committee's visit to Goa comes on the heels of its travel to Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Himachal and Uttarakanda, as well as Punjab, Haryana and Delhi, where it sought the opinion of constitutional experts, retired bureaucracy, educationists and civil society groups. Chaudhary's main takeaway from these consultations is that 99 per cent of civil society stakeholders who met with him have supported this concept. That's an impressive figure for a constitutional change that will need at least the amendment of Article 83 and Article 172, as well as the liquidation or extension of the terms of the current state assemblies, and the creation of a new system to deal with hung assemblies without disrupting the five-year synchronisation that the reform relies on.

It is also a number that is not particularly comfortable when placed next to the opposition India has to face from a set of stakeholders altogether different. Congress general secretary K.C. Venugopal has said that it is a matter of consensus and not consultation after the fact that should have preceded such a decision and that a Bill that will demand a constitutional amendment cannot be discussed at the Cabinet level in the first instance. Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin has said that the plan is logistically impractical and that it is a proposal that runs counter to the federal design of the country. Economist and policy commentator Yamini Aiyar has made a similar argument, but one that's different: simultaneous polling is structurally detrimental for regional parties since the voters who vote on a single day at a single polling station are more likely to let the national contest consume them to the detriment of the regional formations that usually negotiate and consolidate in that limited space. Left parties have taken it a step further and said a system with a 5-year override of any state government would lead to shorter, truncated terms, which would do just the opposite of what the government is saying is effective.

The political argument is steeped in truth, and the business case cannot be ignored. The frequent elections also activate the model code of conduct, which puts a freeze on any new announcements from the government, postpones tenders and slows down public spending in a manner that reflects in quarterly growth numbers in an election-heavy year. Opposition MPs have come back with a more modest figure: the cost of the Lok Sabha polls in 2024 was about ₹3,700 crore, or around 0.02 percent of the yearly outlay of the union budget, a rounding error in comparison to the ₹7 lakh crore loss claimed by the government, which critics say is not worth changing the architecture of federal power-sharing for in the Constitution. A committee report with an independently reviewed economic study, which ought to precede Parliament's vote on the Act, should be able to resolve such a question before Parliament convenes.

If India did, it wouldn't be the only country to do so. In Pakistan, national and provincial elections are held at the same time; in Nepal, they are held simultaneously for national, provincial and European levels since 2015; and in Sweden and Belgium, national, regional and European elections are held on the same timing. But none of the systems has India's scope, the number of regional political parties and the way that the governments have fallen in the middle of their term without being responsible for the electoral design. With the 2029 target Chaudhary now has on the record, it becomes a benchmark for the committee to gauge itself against, and a hard target for those who remain unconvinced, from state capitals to opposition benches, to push back when the bill comes back to the floor of Parliament.