ISLAMABAD, Jan 2: The October 2002 general elections cost the Election Commission Rs1.45 billion compared to Rs1 billion spent on 1997 polls, recording an increase by 39.8 per cent, a report on the General Elections 2002 said.

Compiled by the Election Commission of Pakistan, the report cited inflation, taxes and some new requirements to justify higher expenditure as compared to 1997 elections.

The finance division had initially allocated funds to the tune of Rs334.6 million to conduct the elections despite the fact that budget estimates of Rs1.4 billion were prepared by the commission in February 2002 and submitted to the finance division for the provision of required funds in the annual budget of the commission for the year 2002-03.

These funds were inadequate to meet the actual requirements of election expenditure, therefore commission's budget wing carried out another exercise to assess the actual requirement of funds on the basis of number of voters, polling stations/polling booths and manpower to be engaged for the general elections.

The budget wing submitted its final estimates of Rs1.6 billion to the finance division. Subsequently the division released funds to the tune of Rs500 million first and Rs252 million and Rs195 million as second and third tranche, respectively. An amount of Rs198.3 million was also released to meet the expenses incurred on updating and printing of computerized electoral rolls by the NADRA.

Seventy two million voters had cast votes during the elections in 64,475 polling stations with 164,718 polling booths set up all over the country. The People' Party Parliamentarians (PPP) during the October 2002 general elections secured highest number of votes 7.36 million out of the total 25.9 million votes polled.

The ruling Pakistan Muslim League (PML) managed 6.8 million votes. However, the PPP won 80 seats out of 272 general seats while the PML secured 118 seats during the elections.