Decoding The procedure of Rajya Sabha elections

India is a democratic republic, with representative democracy. The advantage with a representative democracy is that public votes only every few years ,instead of voting each policy one by one. This provides  a certain level of stability and accountability in government.
Elections form the backbone of democracy, where people elect their representatives and decide the composition of government. From parliamentary elections to panchayati polls, India goes through the electoral process at regular intervals at various levels. Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha, state legislative assembly elections and president elections are the examples of elections at various levels.

Lok Sabha elections happen every five year, same is true for state elections but Rajya Sabha elections have a different process, Here is described the process of Rajya Sabha elections and some interesting facts related to it...

1. Rajya Sabha is called upper house of parliament while Lok Sabha is lower house of parliament.
2. Rajya Sabha is also known as 'council of states', as its mp's are chosen by MLAs of states. Rajya Sabha is said to representing the interests of states at parliamentary level.
3. The Rajya Sabha is to consist of not more than 250 members, according to our constitution, 238 members representing the states and union territories and 12 members nominated by president. Although these 12 members are not entitled to vote in presidential election. Currently upper house of parliament has 245 members out of which 233 are representatives of states.
4. The representatives of state and of union territories in the Rajya Sabha are elected by the MLA's of that state and the members of electoral college for that union territory.
5. The allocation of seats in Rajya Sabha to each state or union territory(delhi and Puducherry) is set out in the 4th schedule of the constitution of India. This number is roughly in proportion to state population.
   
6. Members of Rajya Sabha are elected (indirectly) or nominated. It is done with the system of proportional representation by means of single transferable vote.we common people elect the MLA's of state and these MLAs further vote to elect the Rajya Sabha members.In Single Transferable vote system Each voter ranks his preferences and if the first choice candidate has enough votes already or no chance of being elected, the vote is transferred to the second choice and so on.This system also ensures that only majority party can not get its all members elected. This is further explained in example at the end of this post. 
7. Rajya Sabha member has tenure of six years, every two years, 1/3 rd of total members of Rajya Sabha retire.
8. The minimum necessary votes required for any member to get elected as Rajya Sabha MP, from that particular state are calculated by this formula: -

         [total elected MLA's of state/(total no. of candidates to be elected+1)]+1


To understand the process lets take the example of uttarakhand, it has 3 Rajya Sabha seats. It means that every six years, 3 new Rajya Sabha members need to be elected from this state.
This state has 70 elected MLAs.
According to the formula minimum votes required for any person to become Rajya Sabha member from this state is [70/(3+1)]+1=18.5 ~18
Hence minimum 18 votes are required.
for sake of simplicity lets assume that there are only two parties in the state Congress and BJP. Of 70 seats of state legislative assembly suppose BJP has 50 seats and Congress has 20 seats-

Election process :

Members dont vote for each seat. If that had been the case then only the ruling party representatives will make it through.Rather, they are given a paper with the names of all 6 candidates( 3 of congress and 3 from BJP). They have to give their preferences for each candidate as 1,2,3. If 18 or more members choose a candidate as their first choice, he gets elected. So the opposition with 20 seats can get 1 member elected.The ruling party on the other hand can get only 2 members elected (with 36 MLAs giving 18 votes each to their party candidate). It means that 2 votes of Congress and 14 mla votes of BJP are redundant.  From this example it is evident that if BJP had 4 more MLAs i.e 54 it could have elected all 3 members as 18*3=54.

Usually what happens is that parties
wont field candidates for all
seats.Depending on their proportional
representation in the assembly, they
decide after a meeting and field
candidates. That is, Party BJP will field 2
and Party congress will field 1. All of them will
get elected without any problem.

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