The second Constituent Assembly ( CA ) elections scheduled for November 19 looks an expensive affair.

With the Election Commission ( EC ) proposing to double the expenditure ceiling for individual candidates and more political parties applying for registration, the election cost for both the political parties and the EC is set to shoot up way high than that in the 2008 polls.

Citing inflation, a Code of Conduct Committee led by ECCommissioner Ayodhee Prasad Yadav has proposed doubling the ceiling of money a candidate can spend under the First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) system. In the 2008 elections, the EC had allowed a candidate to spend a maximum of Rs 459,500 for the poll campaign. This time around, a candidate can spend upto Rs 919,000 for the campaign.

If the proposed ceiling comes into effect, any party that fields its candidates in all the 240 constituencies will have to manage a minimum of Rs 220.56 million for the candidates contesting under the FPTP electoral system.

The polls will be costlier for the EC too, as the number of parties applying for registration has gone up by almost three times than the number during the 2008 polls. A total of 139 political parties have applied for registration this time, while in 2008, only 54 parties had contested the elections.

“The increased number of parties means additional financial burden for the Commission. We are in a fix as to how we will manage all these parties in a single ballot paper. We have to replace all the previous ballot boxes with new ones,” Chief Election Commissioner Neel Kantha Uprety told the Post.

Data at the EC show that its expenses is increasing with every election. The poll expenditure in the first parliamentary elections held after Jana Aandolan-I in 1991 was Rs 11 million.In the 2008CA elections, the expenses shot up to Rs 3 billion, apart from the expenses incurred in managing security. Rs 2.15 billion was spent for security arrangements during the elections then.

Apart from the security expenses, the EC has this time demanded Rs 7 billion for the polls. The Home Ministry, which handles poll security, has sought Rs 6 billion for the November elections.

“The expenditure may go up as logistics used in 2008 are outdated now,” Uprety said.

Though the new expenditure ceiling will allow candidates to spend big in their campaign, parties’ record when it comes to submitting their election expenses to the EC has been dismal.

According to EC officials, parties show nominal expenses in their poll expenditure reports. According to the EC , the CPN-UML was the largest spender in 2008, with Rs 13.68 million, while the Nepali Congress and the then CPN-Maoist had spent Rs 5.85 million and Rs 3.79 million respectively.