INTRODUCTION
For many Indians, their experience of democracy continues, with regular election-related events such as the Model Code of Conduct and transfers of poll duty. This perpetual election cycle is being tackled by the government's ‘One Nation, One Election' (ONOE). The discussion about costs and constitutional aspects of the law is missing one related institutional debate concerning “staggered boards” of corporate governance. These problems illustrate the fact that the fundamental decision that ONOE is making is not whether he should prioritise efficiency or federal voice, but whether he should increase accountability or long-term stability.
A LETTER FROM THE REFORM'S POINT OF VIEW. THE REFORM'S POINT OF VIEW IN WRITING.
The High-Level Committee on Simultaneous Elections, headed by the former President of India Ram Nath Kovind, submitted its report in March 2024, receiving over 2100 pieces of feedback from the public. It proposed a series of constitutional changes to make the Lok Sabha and State Assembly elections and the local body elections be conducted simultaneously in the first phase, followed by a hundred-day period for the local body elections and suggested the introduction of amendments in about a dozen constitutional articles in this regard. The government accepted these recommendations, and in December 2024, it presented the Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-Ninth Amendment) Bill in the Lok Sabha for detailed scrutiny before a Joint Parliamentary Committee of thirty-nine members. But as of mid-2026, that committee has not finished conducting its consultations across the nation or presented a final report, and its chair has said that simultaneous elections may not be in place until 2034. That is something which must be said out loud, and it will not be a theoretical discussion on what could be done under a certain scenario, but rather a discussion on a bill which is still being developed and is still being debated.
A PAIR OF MODELS OF INSTITUTIONAL TIMING.A PAIR OF INSTITUTIONAL
TIMING MODELS.
The “classified” or staggered board, a concept used in corporate governance, entails the yearto-year replacement of only a portion of the board's directors, thus limiting the extent to which annual shareholder judgment takes place. The “declassified” board is the one that is rotated in full at each cycle, thus giving full leverage to shareholders, while providing a motivation to management to take decisions that will be good at the next elections, not in the long term. The electoral calendar of the past five decades (post 1960's) has been a random and secretive board in India. It was not planned, but rather happened more or less by chance, due to the premature dissolution of several state assemblies in 1968-69 and of the Lok Sabha in 1970, that the Union and each state assembly are now elected at different times. ONOE would like to completely declassify this building and conduct the ballot simultaneously with all governments.
THIS IS REFERRED TO AS THE POLITICAL BUSINESS CYCLE PROBLEM.
This is the main result in the literature on corporate governance. Some scholars, including Lucian Bebchuk and Alma Cohen, have found that regular, fully contested elections for decision makers are associated with short-termism, in which re-election-seeking politicians choose to invest in something that would benefit the long term, but isn't electorally beneficial now. A parallel theory to that of William Nordhaus (1975), about elected governments in particular, suggested that elected governments use fiscal policy to create favourable conditions just prior to elections. Restriction of the Model Code of Conduct has been a regular affair that hampers the implementation of welfare and declaration of policies, which seems to be the takeaway message from the Kovind Committee's reasoning. Instead, the proponents of ONE are promoting the opposite declassification argument: providing a five-year window for more binding elections to ensure that governance would be more continuous.
IN THE MEANTIME, A FEDERAL ALTERNATIVE: CLASSIFIED ELECTIONS BY
DESIGN HAS BEEN CREATED.
But the corporate documents are not a clear-cut resolution for declassification. However, later, the work of John Coates and K. J. Martijn Cremers showed that in certain circumstances, there is a way for opportunistic disruption to be avoided when using a long-horizon strategy: staggered boards. Interestingly, a standalone study by Indian legal scholars on the Kovind Committee report comes up with a structurally similar suggestion; instead of synchronisation, clustering the elections of states with similar election cycles, keeping the elections at the State level but also minimising the administrative burden of having elections occur back-to-back. Rather, it is a deliberate (not bad luck or even completely unclassified) electoral system, more like the staggered class structure of the U.S. Senate than India's standard drift or ONOE's synchronous system. It would bring back many of the administrative savings the government is seeking, but would also provide a federal framework – with state elections being held on a different date, separate from complete federal elections, and where a single national verdict would be applicable.
CONCLUSION
Parliament's Joint Committee is faced with a decision between either keeping things in lawless limbo or complete synchronisation. There is a third, complicating, institutional design in corporate governance theory, which is less of a drift or reversal. If all the generations are constantly exposed to elections, the most crucial question is not so much the number of times they vote but how they do it. That should be the yardstick to assess the status of the ongoing process of legislation, One Nation, One Election (ONOE).
REFERENCES
1. Bebchuk, L. A., & Cohen, A. (2005). The costs of entrenched boards. Journal of Financial Economics, 78(2), 409–433.
2. Cremers, K. J. M., Litov, L. P., & Sepe, S. M. (2017). Staggered boards and longterm firm value, revisited. Journal of Financial Economics, 126(2), 422–444.
3. Government of India, Ministry of Law and Justice. (2024). Report of the High-Level Committee on Simultaneous Elections. https://onoe.gov.in/HLC-Report-en
4. Madhyamam. (2026, July). JPC unlikely to submit 'One Nation, One Election' report during monsoon session. https://madhyamamonline.com/india/jpc-unlikely-tosubmit-one-nation-one-election-report-during-monsoon-session-1533159
5. Maurya, H., & Abraham, A. S. (2024). One Nation One Election through the federal lens: An analysis of the 2024 Ram Nath Kovind Panel Report. International Journal of Law Management & Humanities, 7(3), 2354–2369.
6. Nordhaus, W. D. (1975). The political business cycle. Review of Economic Studies, 42(2), 169–190.