What difficulty did the Election Commission face in holding a free and fair election in the country in the 1951-1952 elections?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → The task of holding an election required delimitation or drawing the boundaries of the electoral constituency that took a lot of time.
Option (1) The task of holding an election required delimitation or drawing the boundaries of the electoral constituency that took a lot of time. — Correct. Holding an election required delimitation of constituencies and the preparation of electoral rolls, and both these tasks took a lot of time.
Option (2) The Election Commission trained less than one lakh officers to conduct the elections. — Incorrect. It trained over 3 lakh officers and polling staff.
Option (3) In the first draft of the rolls, only 40 lakh women voters were found to be eligible for voting. — Incorrect. In the first draft, the names of nearly 40 lakh women were not recorded; they were listed only as “wife of …” or “daughter of …”.
Option (4) Only 20 percent of eligible voters were literate — Incorrect. Only 15 per cent of the eligible voters were literate.
Note: A similar question was also asked in CUET (UG) 2026 on 21-05-2026 (Slot 2).
NCERT (2025-26): “Challenge of building democracy … But the Election Commission discovered that it was not going to be easy to hold a free and fair election in a country of India’s size. Holding an election required delimitation or drawing the boundaries of the electoral constituencies. It also required preparing the electoral rolls, or the list of all the citizens eligible to vote. Both these tasks took a lot of time. When the first draft of the rolls was published, it was discovered that the names of nearly 40 lakh women were not recorded in the list. They were simply listed as ‘wife of …’ or ‘daughter of …’. The Election Commission refused to accept these entries and ordered a revision if possible and deletion if necessary. Preparing for the first general election was a mammoth exercise. No election on this scale had ever been conducted in the world before. At that time there were 17 crore eligible voters, who had to elect about 3,200 MLAs and 489 Members of Lok Sabha. Only 15 per cent of these eligible voters were literate. Therefore the Election Commission had to think of some special method of voting. The Election Commission trained over 3 lakh officers and polling staff to conduct the elections.” |