The sitting committee defeated a panel of members belonging to the Guild in the elections.

The defeated contestants have requested the AEPC to withhold the announcement of the results for 18 seats in the executive committee since several candidates allegedly manipulated the results by getting bogus proxies to fight the election.

"I had brought several cases to the notice of the council like a proxy signing in the name of an exporter who had died years ago," says Madan Jain - one of the contestants from the opposing panel.

Jain adds that they have reasons to believe that there would be more such cases of false proxies which need to be verified by a panel of impartial committee members. He thinks that the improper proxies should be eliminated as also action should be taken against thedefaulting candidates.

According to AIGECCG, today only 3400 out of 30000 exporters have a voting right, as against 10000 in 1984. Out of these 10000, only 2600 exporters continue as members of AEPC now. Between 1984 and 1998, some 25000 new exporters were registered with the AEPC out of which only 800 were given the voting rights.

Such large number remained outside the voting membership because of the rule that the exporters with minimum business of Rs 20 lakh alone would be eligible to vote.

Most of the new exporters are small players.

But many of the exporters registered prior to 1984 who have voting rights since the beginning have not been kept out though they now have no exports or less than Rs 20 lakh. Few members who got monopolistic clutch over the council are allegedly resorting to unfair practice of getting dubious proxies, says an AIGECCG spokesperson.

To bring in transparency to the election process, the Guild had demanded that the proxy vote system should be replaced by simple anddirect voting and that each exporter should have a vote irrespective of the size of the business. "Direct voting alone will bring in people of good track record and then only we can hope to get a sensitive and export friendly council and policies matching the ground realities" says Chand Anand, president of the AIGECCG. On the eve of the election, the opposing panel had suggested to the AEPC to postpone the election to the executive committee and cancel the proxies since they had observed wide scale manipulation of proxies and duplicating the proxies. It also suggested to bring in transparency to the election by issuing fresh proxies and make the whole affair foolproof.