In my first year of graduate school, the Indian politics seminar spent three weeks on the Tenth Schedule. Our professor walked us through Kihoto Hollohan with the brisk rhythm of someone who had taught it many times. The majority opinion got an hour. The Verma and Sharma dissent got fifteen minutes. The dissent, he said, made the better theoretical argument: the Speaker, dependent on the majority of the House for tenure, could not credibly adjudicate questions whose outcomes might affect that majority. The majority, however, was the practical view. Vesting the question elsewhere would invite years of litigation. The dissent was for the seminar room. The majority was for the country.

I remember writing in my notebook that the dissent was probably right. I also remember being told, gently but firmly, that this was the wrong way to read constitutional jurisprudence. The point of the law, my professor said, was not to be theoretically pure. It was to work.

I thought of that seminar last week, watching Raghav Chadha at a press table in Delhi, flanked by Sandeep Pathak and Ashok Mittal, announce that seven of ten Aam Aadmi Party Rajya Sabha members had decided to merge into the Bharatiya Janata Party. The Tenth Schedule was, by Chadha's account, working as designed. Two-thirds of the legislature party had signed. The counter had been satisfied. Whether what was being counted bore any relationship to what the law was meant to prevent was, in the language of constitutional drafting, a question for the seminar room.

This essay is about how the law that was meant to make Indian defections costly came to make them cheap, who has been paying the price, and why the price falls heaviest on states with the least fiscal room to absorb it.

The Event and the Claim

On the afternoon of 24 April 2026, Chadha announced at a press conference that he, along with Sandeep Pathak, Ashok Mittal, Harbhajan Singh, Rajinder Gupta, Vikramjit Singh Sahney and Swati Maliwal, had merged with the BJP. Six of the seven were Punjab MPs; only Maliwal was from Delhi. AAP's pre-defection Rajya Sabha strength was ten. Seven members satisfy the two-thirds threshold by exactly one head.

Two days later, Sanjay Singh filed AAP's disqualification petition with Vice-President and Rajya Sabha Chairman C.P. Radhakrishnan. The legal argument, which Kapil Sibal advanced at a press conference a day earlier, turns on a textual asymmetry in paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule. Sub-paragraph 1 protects a member from disqualification when "his original political party merges with another political party." Sub-paragraph 2 supplies a deeming fiction: the merger of the original political party "shall be deemed to have taken place if, and only if, not less than two-thirds of the members of the legislature party concerned have agreed to such merger." Sibal's contention is that an organisational merger requires the consent of the political party as such, not just its parliamentary contingent. The Aam Aadmi Party, as an organisation led by Arvind Kejriwal, has passed no resolution to merge with the BJP. A resolution by seven of ten Rajya Sabha members alone, on his reading, cannot deem an entity that has not assented to its own dissolution.

The opposite reading has been articulated by Chakshu Roy at PRS Legislative Research and by senior advocate Neeraj Kishan Kaul, and rests on the literal text of 4(2), which makes the legislature-party threshold sufficient. P.D.T. Achary, former Lok Sabha Secretary General, takes the middle position: the Chairman has the power to interpret, the interpretation is judicially reviewable, and either reading is open.

There is a recent and direct precedent. On 21 June 2019, then Rajya Sabha Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu accepted the resolution of four of six Telugu Desam Party Rajya Sabha members to merge with the BJP, despite the TDP's organisational protest that no party-level merger had taken place. The legislature-party threshold was treated as sufficient. The Bombay High Court's Goa Bench, in Girish Chodankar v Speaker (24 February 2022), adopted the same disjunctive reading.

The Chairman's likely posture, given this trajectory, is to accept the merger. The challenge AAP can mount is constitutional review. As Sibal observed, that route is its own punishment: it would take, in his estimate, "five years to get through India's legal rigmarole." Punjab's assembly elections are scheduled for early 2027.

A counter that was always going to come up short

The Tenth Schedule was inserted into the Constitution by the 52nd Amendment Act of 1985, passed by the 8th Lok Sabha within weeks of Rajiv Gandhi's swearing-in with the largest parliamentary majority in Indian history. Its Statement of Objects and Reasons called political defections "a matter of national concern" and warned they would "undermine the very foundations of our democracy." The 1985 framing was specific to the post-1967 record of the Y.B. Chavan Committee, which had documented 542 defections between 1952 and 1967, and 438 in the twelve months between February 1967 and March 1968. The Chavan Committee proposed a bar on defectors holding ministerial office and a smaller Council of Ministers, but did not recommend the disqualification regime that was later introduced. Two earlier legislative attempts, the 32nd Amendment Bill of 1973 and the 48th Amendment Bill of 1978, lapsed before reaching the floor. The 52nd was the first to make it.

The 1985 design contained two exemptions to its disqualification rule. Paragraph 3 protected legislators who left in a "split" of one-third or more of their original party. Paragraph 4 protected those who were left in a "merger" of two-thirds or more. The first was the lower threshold, used heavily from 1985 to 2003; the second was the higher threshold, treated as a safety valve for principled mergers between sympathetic parties. When the 91st Amendment was passed in 2003, its Statement of Objects and Reasons acknowledged that the split provision had a "destabilising effect" and Parliament chose to delete paragraph 3. Parliament did not delete paragraph 4. The 170th Law Commission Report had recommended the deletion of both paragraph 3 and paragraph 4; the Halim Committee, the Goswami Committee, and the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution made the same recommendation. The 91st Amendment took half the advice. The merger door stayed open.

The textual mechanism at the heart of paragraph 4 is what the Constitution refers to as a "deeming fiction." Sub-paragraph 1 speaks of the "original political party" merging with another. Sub-paragraph 2 says that such a merger "shall be deemed to have taken place if, and only if, not less than two-thirds of the members of the legislature party concerned have agreed to such merger." The original political party, as defined in the Schedule's interpretation clause, is the body that nominated the member and continues as the political party of which the member was a member.

The legislature party is "the group consisting of all the members of that House for the time being belonging to that political party." These are not the same entity. The first contains the second; it also contains the office bearers, the cadre, the manifestos, the fund-raising apparatus, and, in the case of a party like AAP, the Lok Sabha members, the state assembly members, and the millions of registered party workers who are not in any legislature.

The deeming fiction in 4(2) treats consent of the smaller body as consent of the larger. It does so as a matter of statutory mechanics. A merger of seven Rajya Sabha members, who are elected by the indirect vote of state legislators, can be deemed a merger of an entire national party recognised across four states. The fiction does not pretend to track the substance of organisational consent; it announces that, for purposes of disqualification, it need not.

What the 91st Amendment left in place was therefore a mechanism in which the smaller a party's parliamentary contingent in a given chamber, the lower the absolute number of members required to merge. AAP had ten Rajya Sabha members. The merger threshold was seven. Had AAP had nine, the threshold would have been six. The numerical bar set by paragraph 4(2), expressed as a fraction of the legislature party, can be cleared by very small absolute numbers when the legislature party is itself small. This is not a defect of any one episode. It is the design.

The tribunal that was always partial

When the Tenth Schedule was challenged in 1992, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court split 3:2 in Kihoto Hollohan v Zachillhu. The majority, speaking through Justices Venkatachaliah, Reddy and Agrawal, upheld the Schedule but struck down its paragraph 7, which had attempted to oust judicial review of Speaker decisions. The Speaker, the majority held, was a "tribunal" whose orders were reviewable on grounds of mala fides, perversity, or violation of constitutional mandates, but only after the order had been made.

The dissent, by Justices Verma and Sharma, made a point that has aged better than the majority's. The Speaker, they wrote, holds office at the pleasure of the majority of the House and "does not satisfy the requirement of such an independent adjudicatory authority; and his choice as the sole arbiter in the matter violates an essential attribute of the basic feature." The constitutional default for disqualification of legislators, under Articles 103 and 192, is a decision by the President or Governor on the advice of the Election Commission. That is the framers' design.

The 52nd Amendment displaced it, putting in the Speaker's hands a question on which the Speaker's continued tenure depended. Verma and Sharma would have struck down that vesting outright.

The empirical record since has been the dissent's vindication. The law gives no time limit within which the Speaker must decide, and a long line of jurisprudence has been required to extract even the most modest discipline. In Keisham Meghachandra Singh v Speaker, Manipur Legislative Assembly on 21 January 2020, the Supreme Court held that the Speaker, acting as a tribunal under the Tenth Schedule, is bound to decide disqualification petitions within a "reasonable period," and that, absent exceptional circumstances, three months is the outer limit. In Padi Kaushik Reddy v State of Telangana on 31 July 2025, the Court reiterated the three-month direction and held that the Speaker enjoys no constitutional immunity while acting as a tribunal under the Tenth Schedule. By November 2025, Chief Justice B.R. Gavai was warning the Telangana Speaker of contempt. The Telangana Speaker eventually dismissed all ten Bharat Rashtra Samithi petitions for "insufficient evidence," in batches between December 2025 and March 2026.

Telangana is not an exception. The records of Andhra Pradesh between 2014 and 2018, where 23 YSR Congress MLAs defected to the ruling Telugu Desam Party with no Speaker action, of West Bengal, where Mukul Roy's disqualification was finally ordered by the Calcutta High Court directly on 13 November 2025 after years of pending Speaker proceedings (with the Supreme Court staying the order on 16 January 2026), of Maharashtra in 2022 and 2023, where Speaker Rahul Narwekar's 10 January 2024 ruling declared the Eknath Shinde faction the "real Shiv Sena," and the parallel ruling on Ajit Pawar's NCP faction a month later, all point in the same direction. In each case, the Speaker took the side of the political formation on whose continued support the Speaker's office depended. Verma and Sharma had said this would happen.

The Centre for Legal Policy at Vidhi has done the most careful empirical study of how often the law produces the outcome it was written to produce. Of fifty-five disqualification petitions before Lok Sabha Speakers between 1986 and 2004, forty-nine produced no disqualification, and seventy-seven per cent of those non-disqualifications passed through a "valid split or merger" claim. In Uttar Pradesh, between 1990 and 2008, 69 petitions resulted in only 2 disqualifications. In approximately eighty-two per cent of the non-outcomes, the merger or split exemption did the work. These are not failure rates of an institution working under strain. These are baseline operating ratios of an institution working as designed.

What the post-2014 record actually shows

The narrative of "Operation Lotus" has hardened into shorthand for a more systematic phenomenon. The phrase originated in Karnataka in 2008, when the BJP fell three seats short of a majority, formed a government with the support of six independents, and then induced seven Congress and JD(S) MLAs to resign and contest by-elections on the BJP ticket, consolidating its majority through what came to be called Operation Kamala. By the time the Association for Democratic Reforms studied the period 2016 to 2020, it found that 405 MLAs had defected and re-contested. Of these, 170 (42 per cent) had left the Indian National Congress, and 18 (4.4 per cent) had left the BJP. The BJP had absorbed 182 of the recontesting MLAs, or 44.9 per cent. Of the sixteen Rajya Sabha members who defected in the same window, ten joined the BJP. All sixteen Rajya Sabha defectors won their next election. In a separate compilation drawn from ADR data, The Print estimated in August 2022 that 211 MPs and MLAs had joined the BJP in the eight years from 2014.

The state-level toppling sequence is the visible part of this. Arunachal Pradesh in 2016, when Pema Khandu took 43 Congress MLAs to the People's Party of Arunachal Pradesh in September, and 33 of them to the BJP by December, reducing Congress in the 60-member assembly from over 40 seats to 1 within a year. Uttarakhand in 2016, where nine Congress MLAs revolted. Manipur in 2017, where Congress emerged as the single largest party, but the BJP formed a government with the support of post-election Congress defectors. Goa in 2019, when 10 of 15 Congress MLAs led by Chandrakant Kavlekar merged with the BJP, and again in September 2022, when 8 of 11 Congress MLAs did the same. Karnataka in 2019, where seventeen MLAs from the Congress, JDS and independent benches resigned to bring down the H.D. Kumaraswamy government, were eventually disqualified by Speaker K.R. Ramesh Kumar, were unbarred by the Supreme Court in time to contest the December 2019 by-elections, and were fielded by the BJP. Madhya Pradesh in March 2020, where Jyotiraditya Scindia took 22 Congress MLAs across, brought down the Kamal Nath government, and was rewarded with a Rajya Sabha seat and a Union ministry. Maharashtra in 2022 and again in 2023.

In none of these episodes did the Tenth Schedule operate as the framers of the 52nd Amendment intended. In every episode, the merger or split exemption produced the legal cover, the Speaker provided the timing, and the courts arrived too late to alter the political outcome. By the time the Supreme Court's Subhash Desai judgment was pronounced in May 2023, holding that the Speaker had erred in recognising the Shinde faction's whip on the basis of a legislature-party resolution alone, Eknath Shinde had been Chief Minister of Maharashtra for nearly a year. The remedy lagged behind the harm by an electoral cycle.

Allegations have circulated about the price at which legislators have been induced to cross. In May 2018, H.D. Kumaraswamy alleged that Karnataka MLAs had been offered Rs 100 crore each. In March 2020, Digvijaya Singh alleged that Madhya Pradesh MLAs had been offered Rs 25 crore each in three instalments. Both figures are political allegations from rival politicians; neither has been forensically documented, and BJP leaders have rejected them. They are, however, useful as expressions of the price at which the threshold of legal sanction can apparently be cleared. In a market where the Tenth Schedule's expected cost of disqualification has, over four decades, fallen close to zero, the rational price of a legislator's signature is bounded only by the marginal value of executive control. Allegations of nine-figure inducements describe what the law has failed to deter, not what the law was designed to permit.

The economics of an empty deterrent

The development economics literature on political instability and fiscal performance has been clear for over two decades. Mala Lalvani's 2003 paper in Economics of Governance, which examined Indian state governments between the 1980s and the late 1990s, found that mid-term changes of government were associated with adverse outcomes for growth and fiscal health indicators. Frequent inter-electoral changes produce reversals of allocative decisions, postpone capital expenditure during periods of contested control, and disrupt the multi-year planning cycles on which infrastructure and human-development investment depend. Fabrizio Carmignani's survey in the Journal of Economic Surveys, in the same year, generalised the pattern across emerging economies: political instability raises uncertainty over future tax rates, property rights, and contract enforcement, lowering the steady-state return to capital and pushing incumbents facing a high probability of defeat to the strategic accumulation of public debt.

The Indian fiscal federalism literature has documented the second part of the mechanism. Stuti Khemani's 2007 paper in the Journal of Development Economics shows that Finance Commission transfers, which are rule-based and constitutional, are not subject to partisan capture, while discretionary central-political transfers systematically favour states aligned with the ruling party at the Centre. Wiji Arulampalam, Sugato Dasgupta, Amrita Dhillon and Bhaskar Dutta's 2009 paper in the same journal confirms that aligned and swing states receive larger discretionary transfers than non-aligned states. The empirical structure of Indian fiscal federalism is one in which conformity to the Centre's political formation is rewarded, and the rewards available are large.

Read against this background, the Chadha defection is not principally an episode of party politics. It is an episode of fiscal-federal positioning. The seven members who left were not, with one exception, well-known floor performers in the Rajya Sabha. They were, however, members from a state, Punjab, whose debt-to-GSDP ratio of 45.2 percent in the FY26 revised estimates is among the highest in the Union, whose committed expenditure on salaries, pensions and interest stood at 85 percent of revenue receipts in the FY25 actuals, and whose fiscal deficit at 4.7 percent of GSDP in FY25 sits structurally above the 16th Finance Commission's recommended ceiling of 3 percent. Their state's Revenue Deficit Grants under the 15th Finance Commission tapered to zero in FY26. Their state's own Finance Minister, Harpal Cheema, has acknowledged that 85 per cent of the AAP government's fresh borrowing has been used to service old debt.

To frame this transaction in the language of public choice, the question is not whether seven members crossed for personal benefit. It is whether the cost-benefit calculation of their party at large has shifted in a direction that makes accommodation with the Centre's ruling formation rationally compelling. The answer, based on the facts of Punjab's fiscal situation, is yes. A state government whose fiscal manoeuvring depends, in increasing measure, on central forbearance, central concurrence, and central ad hoc release has every incentive to maintain a working relationship with the Centre's ruling party. The cost of antagonism, paid in delayed RDF reimbursements, in PSPCL discom restructuring, and in the 16th Finance Commission's discretion over Ludhiana and Amritsar wastewater grants, is borne not by individual legislators but by the state's residents.

The Tenth Schedule, in its present form, does not account for this cost. It provides a counter (two-thirds of the legislative party) and a tribunal (the Speaker, or, in this case, the Chairman) and stops there. What happens to fiscal-federal balance, to the policy continuity that allows multi-year capital projects to be planned, to the deliberative voice of states whose representatives have been replaced by the ruling party's representatives, is treated as outside the law's perimeter. As I argued in an earlier essay on India's fiscal centralisation, the centralisation of fiscal authority has been accompanied by the contraction of plausible state opposition. Defection is one of the mechanisms by which that contraction is achieved.

Punjab, specifically

Of the seven defectors, six are Punjab MPs. This is not a coincidence. Punjab is currently governed by AAP, which won 92 of 117 assembly seats in February 2022. Its government has presided over a period of fiscal stress that pre-dates its arrival but has been sharpened by additional welfare commitments, including the 300-units-free domestic electricity scheme, the Mukh Mantri Mawan Dhian Satkar Yojana cash transfer, and the reversion to the Old Pension Scheme in November 2022, whose long-term liability the Reserve Bank of India has flagged in successive State of State Finances reports.

The state's fiscal position, as captured in the Punjab Budget 2026-27, is among the most stressed in the Union. Its FY27 budget projects a revenue deficit of 2.2 per cent of Gross State Domestic Product against a 16th Finance Commission ceiling of zero, and a fiscal deficit of 4.1 per cent against the Commission's 3 per cent ceiling. Its FY26 revised estimates are worse on both counts, with revenue deficit at 3.0 per cent and fiscal deficit at 4.2 per cent. Its outstanding liabilities are projected at 45.1 per cent of GSDP, or approximately Rs 4.42 lakh crore, by end-FY27. The free farm power subsidy alone, at Rs 7,715 crore in FY27, exceeds the state's entire announced health sector allocation of Rs 6,879 crore for the year, and the total power subsidies of Rs 15,550 crore are more than twice the health allocation. The 16th Finance Commission has discontinued Revenue Deficit Grants and most sector-specific grants for the 2026 to 2031 period.

In this configuration, the Centre's discretion over Punjab's fiscal envelope has expanded. The Article 293(3) borrowing-permission regime gives the Union Finance Ministry effective control over the volume of fresh debt the state can incur. By the state government's own account, the Centre reduced Punjab's open-market borrowing entitlement by Rs 16,676 crore in FY26 on account of legacy dues of the state power utility. The pending RDF and market-fee reimbursements give the Centre time to time its releases. The 16th Finance Commission's special infrastructure grants for wastewater management, for which Ludhiana and Amritsar are each eligible up to Rs 5,000 crore over the cycle, will pass through Union ministries and central guidelines. The window in which the Centre's goodwill is a functional precondition for the state's fiscal manoeuvring is now, and will remain so, for the duration of the 16th Finance Commission cycle.

It is into this window that six Punjab Rajya Sabha members have walked. The arithmetic of their effect is more political than legislative. The Rajya Sabha is itself an indirectly elected chamber whose members are often more concerned with proximity to the centre than with constituency representation, and a single state's Rajya Sabha contingent is not the principal lever in fiscal-federal negotiations. What it does represent, however, is the formal voice of the state in the Union Parliament, the standing committees that scrutinise central legislation affecting state finances, and the public record of Centre-state contestation. Punjab holds seven Rajya Sabha seats, all of which AAP had held since its 2022 sweep; six of those seven now sit with the BJP. AAP's national Rajya Sabha contingent has contracted from ten to three.

It would be a category mistake to read this as a story about Raghav Chadha's career trajectory or about the Aam Aadmi Party's organisational discipline. The structural fact is that a fiscally distressed state, in the opening weeks of the implementation cycle of a Finance Commission whose own report acknowledges Punjab's fiscal stress and recommends conditional restructuring of its power-sector debt, has lost most of its parliamentary bargaining capacity. The price of that loss is not paid by any one defector. It is paid by the state's tax base over the next decade, in the form of borrowing constraints, conditionalities attached to power-sector grants, and a thinning of deliberative voice on Punjab's specific circumstances at the central table.

What can be done

The reform record is unequivocal. Every official body that has examined the Tenth Schedule since 1990 has recommended that disqualification adjudication be moved out of the Speaker's hands. The Dinesh Goswami Committee in 1990 recommended that the President or Governor make a decision on the advice of the Election Commission, and that whip-based disqualification be limited to confidence motions, money bills, and motions of thanks.

The 170th Law Commission Report in 1999 recommended deleting paragraphs 3 and 4 altogether, leaving paragraph 2 to do all the work, with adjudication moved to the President or Governor on the Election Commission's advice. The Halim Committee, in its 2003 report, made parallel recommendations. The National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution in 2002 went further, requiring defectors to resign their seats and contest fresh elections, and treating defectors' votes as invalid in any motion to topple a government.

The Second Administrative Reforms Commission, in its Fourth Report on Ethics in Governance in 2007, endorsed the President or Governor's adjudication on the Election Commission's advice. The 255th Law Commission Report in 2015 reiterated the same. The Election Commission has restated its position in 2004 and again in 2010.

Parliament has acted on none of these. The 91st Amendment in 2003 took the easy half of the advice, deleting the splits exemption while keeping the merger exemption. Manish Tewari's private members' bills in 2010, 2021 and 2025 have proposed limiting whip-based disqualification to confidence motions and shifting adjudication to a division bench of the High Court for state matters and the Supreme Court for parliamentary matters, with statutory time limits. None has been taken up.

The comparative practice in Westminster democracies suggests that the legal disqualification approach is, in any case, neither necessary nor sufficient for governing defection. In the United Kingdom, where there is no anti-defection law and floor crossing is governed by candidate selection and electoral accountability, Phillip Lee's defection in September 2019 cost Boris Johnson his working majority on the day of the defection but did not cost Lee his seat; he stood as a Liberal Democrat in Wokingham at the December 2019 general election and lost. In the United States, Arlen Specter's defection from Republican to Democrat in 2009 was followed by his loss in the 2010 Democratic primary to Joe Sestak. In Australia, where party discipline is strong but legal disqualification is absent, ministers who cross the floor are expected to resign portfolios but retain their seats. In each of these cases, the discipline is supplied by candidate reselection, by primaries, and by voters at the next election. The Indian peculiarity is to have constitutionalised a sanction that is bypassed via paragraph 4 while sacrificing the deliberative function of legislators on every other vote.

The simplest reform, and the one closest to the framers' Article 103 and 192 design, is to vest disqualification in the President or Governor on the advice of the Election Commission, with a statutory ninety-day decision window, and to delete paragraph 4 outright. Mergers between parties would still be possible, but each member would have to resign and contest a fresh election to validate the change. The voter, not the Speaker or Chairman, would be the adjudicator. These are the Goswami, Law Commission, National Commission, and Election Commission recommendations. It has been on the public record for thirty-six years.

What the Dissent Saw

The Indian politics seminar I sat in had the order of things wrong. The Verma and Sharma dissent was not the seminar-room view, the academically interesting position that practical men set aside. It was the empirical description. The majority opinion was not the practical view; it was an act of constitutional optimism that has been falsified across forty years of state-level practice. The dissent was telling us what the law would do. The majority was telling us what we wished it would do.

The framers of 1985 told themselves they were addressing the foundations of Indian democracy. The drafters of 2003 told themselves they were closing a destabilising loophole. What they actually built, and what has now been demonstrated to work as designed, is a counter that ratifies what political negotiation can produce, slowly enough that judicial review arrives after the next election.

There is a version of this story in which the relevant question is whether one young politician was right to leave one party for another. That question is, frankly, less interesting than the one the law was supposed to be answering. The law was supposed to make defection costly. It has, instead, set a price for it. The price has fallen, in real terms, every year since 1985. In Punjab, in April 2026, the price was paid by a state whose fiscal account cannot afford it.

Further Reading

On the law and its defects

The Tenth Schedule of the Constitution of India (Ministry of External Affairs text). Kihoto Hollohan v Zachillhu, AIR 1993 SC 412 (Indian Kanoon). Subhash Desai v Principal Secretary, Governor of Maharashtra, 2023 INSC 516 (Indian Kanoon). Madhav Khosla and Milan Vaishnav, "Democracy and Defections," International Journal of Constitutional Law 22(2): 400–430 (2024). Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, Anatomy of India's Anti-Defection Law (2023). PRS Legislative Research, The Anti-Defection Law: Intent and Impact.

On the political economy of state finances

Mala Lalvani, "Sounding the Alarm: Impact of Political Instability on Growth and Fiscal Health of the Indian Economy," Economics of Governance 4(2): 103–114 (2003). Stuti Khemani, "Does Delegation of Fiscal Policy to an Independent Agency Make a Difference? Evidence from Intergovernmental Transfers in India," Journal of Development Economics 82(2): 464–484 (2007). Wiji Arulampalam, Sugato Dasgupta, Amrita Dhillon and Bhaskar Dutta, "Electoral Goals and Centre-State Transfers in India," Journal of Development Economics 88(1): 103–119 (2009). PRS Legislative Research, Punjab Budget Analysis 2026-27.

On reform

170th Law Commission of India Report, Reform of the Electoral Laws (1999). Dinesh Goswami Committee, Report on Electoral Reforms (1990, ADR archive). Second Administrative Reforms Commission, Fourth Report on Ethics in Governance (2007). 255th Law Commission of India Report, Electoral Reforms (2015).

Varna is a development economist and writes at policygrounds.press.