To enhance the quality of democracy in India the Election Commission of India has proposed electoral reforms in 2016. What are the suggested reforms and how far are they significant to make democracy successful?

In December 2016 the Election Commission of India (ECI) submitted a compendium of Proposed Electoral Reforms — around 47 proposals — to the Law Ministry, targeting the money power, criminalisation and opacity that corrode electoral integrity.

Suggested Reforms

• Make bribery of voters a cognizable offence, and empower the Commission to countermand a poll where credible evidence of large-scale vote-buying surfaces.
• Declare paid news an electoral offence, and make filing a false affidavit a corrupt practice inviting enhanced punishment and disqualification.
• Cap anonymous cash donations to political parties at ₹2,000, down from ₹20,000, to clean political funding.
• Restrict candidates to one constituency, or at least recover the cost of the consequential by-election from a candidate winning two seats.
• Use totaliser machines for counting so booth-wise voting patterns are not revealed, shielding localities from post-poll victimisation.
• Institutional strengthening: statutory power to deregister political parties, rule-making power under the RP Act vested in the Commission, an independent secretariat with expenditure charged on the Consolidated Fund of India, and the same constitutional protection for Election Commissioners as the CEC enjoys.

Significance for Democracy

• The proposals strike at the biggest distortions — unaccounted money, muscle power and manipulated information — levelling the field for honest candidates and protecting voter autonomy and secrecy.
• Some traction followed: the Finance Act, 2017 adopted the ₹2,000 cash-donation cap, and the Supreme Court's electoral bonds verdict (2024) reinforced the funding-transparency logic the ECI had championed.

Limitations

• Most proposals require Parliament to amend the RP Act, 1951 — precisely where partisan incentives resist change; deregistration and countermanding powers remain unlegislated, keeping the reforms largely on paper.

Electoral reform is the infrastructure of democratic quality. Converting the ECI's proposals into law, as the Law Commission's 170th and 255th reports also urge, is now essentially a test of political will.