This article is by Soutik Biswas and Vijdan Mohammad Kawoosa, BBC News and BBC Monitoring, Delhi. Here is an excerpt:

And the number of parties which have contested general elections – where nearly a billion voters cast their ballots in millions of polling stations – has jumped from 29 in 1962 to 669 in 2019.

That’s nearly a rise of 2,200%.

But the number of parties that actually managed to win at least one seat in a general election has increased by only 71% – from 21 in 1962 to 36 in 2019.

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