Tarkunde Committee (1975)
Topic: Electoral Reforms: Money, Criminalisation and Simultaneous Elections · NCERT: Beyond NCERT
Meaning
The Tarkunde Committee (1975) was an early, non-official committee on electoral reform. Jayaprakash Narayan's group, Citizens for Democracy, set it up rather than the government. It proposed three main changes:
- lowering the voting age to 18;
- a multi-member Election Commission instead of a single Commissioner;
- curbs on money power in elections.
It matters because all three ideas were adopted later. This shows how a civil society proposal can shape the law over time.
Example
The voting age was later cut from 21 to 18 by the 61st Amendment, so the committee's first proposal became law.
Don't confuse with
- Dinesh Goswami Committee (1990): a government committee whose proposals included EVMs, a two-seat cap on contesting and limited state funding in kind. Many of its ideas went into the 1996 RPA amendments.