Read the passage and answer the following questions
At the outset it needs to be emphasized that election finance reform in India involves two related but distinct issues. One is the cost of elections per se. The other is politicians’ imperative to raise election funds and, hence, the temptation to abuse power. In theory, it is possible to reduce the cost of elections without reducing the imperatives of politicians. It is also possible, in theory, to reduce considerably the imperative to abuse power to raise election funds without reducing the cost of elections.
    In the first case, even if the cost of elections were reduced they would still cost something not inconsiderable and that money would have to be raised from private contributions. This would still lead to strong pressures to raise money by illegal means while in office even if the amount were frozen or reduced, making it difficult to effect any real deregulation in the government.
In the second case, it is possible to greatly reduce the imperatives for corruption, to the extent that they arise from the need for election funds, even without reducing election costs if state funding of elections is instituted. State funding will provide a financial floor to parties and candidates. Fund raising will no longer be a political life-or-death imperative. This opens up the possibility of greatly reducing corruption. While the two issues are complementary we make the point to underline their distinctiveness. The link between these two issues is that both kinds of reduction increase equality of political opportunity, an important objective for democracy in a poor country.
Deriving policy mixes from actual and possible variants of the three broad international patterns of election finance reform, i.e., minimalist, maximalist and mixed, there are, broadly speaking, six options that are available for India in increasing order of magnitude of their distance from the status quo.
The first option would be a minimalist pattern of state regulation on the present U.K. model. It would consist of limits on candidate spending but no state funding other than free media time. Party spending would be allowed without limits if there is no mention of my candidate, but will be clubbed with candidate spending and deemed authorized by the candidate if it identifies candidates.