New Delhi: Women's participation in elections has been rising much faster than men, and the 2019 Lok Sabha elections could be the first time in India's history that women's turnout will be higher than men's, claims a new book. Between the 1962 and 2014 Lok Sabha elections there has been nearly a 20 per cent increase in women's turnout versus only a five per cent increase in men's turnout, it says.

"Today, the turnout of both women and men is almost the same. In fact, in State Assembly elections, women's turnout has now overtaken men's turnout. Women voters had a 71 per cent turnout versus 70 per cent for men. A revolutionary change, the book "The Verdict: Decoding India's Elections" says. Written by Prannoy Roy and Dorab R Sopariwala, the book seeks to address the need for a detached assessment of almost seven decades of elections, their evolution, the enormity of their scale and their confounding complexity. It uses psephology, research and as-yet-undisclosed facts to talk about the entire span of India's electoral history from the first elections in 1952.