Q1.
About 34 per cent of eligible voters did not exercise their right to vote in the 2024 elections. Why do you think this is so? What are some challenges people face in exercising their rights? Design and conduct a short survey among adults in your family and neighbourhood to answer these questions. Analyse the data and write a report with suggestions on how it may be possible to ensure everyone votes.
Answer
Start with the number. About 968 million voters were eligible in 2024, so 34 per cent not voting means roughly one in three eligible Indians — about 329 million people — did not cast a vote. That is larger than the entire population of most countries, which is why the chapter treats it as a serious question about the health of the democracy.
34% of 968 million
= 0.34 × 968 = 329.1 million
→ about 66 per cent did vote — roughly two out of every three
= 0.34 × 968 = 329.1 million
→ about 66 per cent did vote — roughly two out of every three
Why people do not vote — group the reasons, because the remedies differ:
| Kind of reason | Examples | What would actually fix it |
|---|---|---|
| Practical | Migrant workers registered in a home village hundreds of kilometres away; polling day is a working day and daily-wage loss is real; illness or old age; the booth is far | Postal and home voting; a paid holiday enforced; registration where a person actually lives |
| Administrative | Name missing or misspelt in the voter list; no ID proof; never registered after moving city | Online checking and correction of the roll; door-to-door verification drives |
| Attitude — this is what the chapter calls voter apathy | “My one vote will not change anything”; “all candidates are the same”; urban voters in particular treat polling day as a holiday | Awareness campaigns; showing local results decided by small margins; explaining NOTA as the honest alternative to staying home |
| Information | Not knowing the date, the booth, or what the candidates stand for | SMS and app alerts; candidate information published by the ECI; school and college voter-awareness drives |
Designing the survey — a workable plan:
- Sample: 10–15 adults across at least two households besides your own, mixing ages (a young adult, a middle-aged worker, an elderly person) and both women and men. Note age group and gender only — not names.
- Questions, kept short: (i) Did you vote in the last election? (ii) If not, what was the main reason? (iii) How far is your polling station? (iv) Was your name correctly in the voter list? (v) What one change would make it easier for you to vote?
- Analysis: tally the reasons and rank them. Work out the percentage who voted, and compare it with the national figure of about 66 per cent.
- Report: one page — the method, a small table of results, the top three reasons, and three suggestions that follow from your own data, not from a general list.
Sample finding (write your own from real answers): “Of the 12 adults surveyed, 9 voted. Of the 3 who did not, 2 said their names were not on the list and 1 was working outside the state. Suggestion: a voter-list verification camp in our locality two months before polling.”
Why ‘everyone must vote’ needs care as a conclusion: the right to vote is a right, and India does not make voting compulsory. So the honest aim of your suggestions is to remove every obstacle in the way of a citizen who wants to vote, and to persuade the one who does not see the point — not to force anyone. That is also why NOTA exists: it lets a dissatisfied voter register the dissatisfaction inside the system instead of walking away from it.