Dehradun: Congress’ mayoral candidate for Dehradun Municipal Corporation (DMC), Dinesh Agarwal, spent almost eight-and-a-half times more money on election campaigning in the past week than the first two weeks of canvass.The figures submitted to the state election commission show that after claiming to have spent just Rs 24,630 on campaigning in the first two weeks, Agarwal spent Rs 2,07,346 on campaigning in the past one week.As reported by TOI earlier, Agarwal’s election expenditure was 13 times less than AAP’s mayoral candidate Rajni Rawat. Anomalies like this in the election expenditure figures had forced the state election commission to issue notices to the candidates.While Agarwal could not be contacted for his comment, a source close to him explained that his election expenditure was increasingly high this week since “campaigning has entered the final leg and workers are more active on ground.”“While other parties had started campaigning much earlier, our campaign started this week. Now our workers are holding meetings and putting up posters across the city. That’s why our expenditure has increased so much,” the Congress member said.Interestingly, after spending over Rs 2 lakh in the past one week, Agarwal also surpassed BJP’s candidate Sunil Uniyal Gama. In the three weeks of campaigning, Gama has spent Rs 2.16 lakh while Agarwal has spent a total of Rs 2.32 lakh.AAP’s Rajni Rawat, however, still continues to be the highest spender in the elections. Rawat has claimed to have spent almost Rs 5 lakh on her campaign so far. She alleged that she is the only candidate who is “revealing the actual amount spent.” “Both the BJP and Congress are hiding what they have actually spent. You will see their posters everywhere and now the BJP has even deployed their Rath. How can their expenditures be so low?” Rawat said.

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