Hyderabad, May 6 -- After India attained independence from British rule, the first general election was held between 25th October, 1951 and 21 February, 1952. As can be easily imagined, it was a mammoth exercise and it played a pivotal role to set the standard for all subsequent elections.

Almost 2000 candidates from 53 parties and many independents were in the fray for 489 seats in the Lok Sabha. The state level elections were also scheduled to be held simultaneously. The population of India then was about 361 million as per the census carried out in 1951 and the literacy rate was only 18.33 percent.

Posed big challenges

Because of the challenging logistics, the election was held in a staggering 68 phases. A total of 196,084 polling b...