HYDERABAD - SIR Mark Tully, BBC's India bureau chief for 22 years, recalls a Times of London report in 1967 as India prepared for its fourth general election.

The Times, he says, predicted it would be India's last election and concluded that 'the great experience of developing India within a democratic framework has failed'.

Four decades later, India has a trillion-dollar economy, the Congress is weakened but still in charge, and its patron family, the Gandhis, continue to control the party founded in 1885.

What is more, millions of Indians will be streaming into polling booths today as the world's biggest democracy kicks off its 15th general election.

Spread across 17 states and federally run territories, 124 of the 543 seats in Parliament's powerful Lower House are up for grabs in the first phase of the election.

The remaining seats will be decided over four more phases that run until May13, so security forces can be moved around to ensure free and peaceful polling. Counting is scheduled for May 16 and results are expected the same day.

Indians typically vote heavily in state elections, where local issues tend to dominate. Parliamentary polls tend to draw thinner lines at polling booths.

But with the Election Commission having rid voter lists of thousands of spurious names, and dozens of non-governmental organisations as well as some newspapers campaigning to get more urban voters to turn up, polling percentages could be higher than normal.

'We are in the midst of a democratic upsurge, of the kind that could become a model in the history of democracy,' said Professor Yogendra Yadav of New Delhi's Centre for Study of Developing Societies, perhaps India's best-known election expert.

Read the full story in Thursday's edition of The Straits Times.