India is about to go to the polls, but not before a splash of colour

Vote sees 900 million people make their voices heard and is more than a month in the making

With the opening of nominations for candidates, this week kicked off the most extraordinary democratic spectacle on Earth – the Indian general election.

The numbers underpinning the exercise are truly staggering. An estimated 900 million people are eligible to vote out of a population of more than 1.3 billion. Turnout is traditionally solid – at the last general election in 2014, 553 million votes were cast – or about 66 per cent of the electorate.

The country is so sprawling that voting will take place not over a day or two but across more than a month, in seven stages, between 11 April and 19 May. The Election Commission of India, itself a behemoth of an independent authority with 300 full-time staff in its Delhi HQ alone, set up 927,553 polling stations in 2014, each serving an average of around 900 voters.