Q.Which tasks are NOT performed by Election Commission: preparing electoral rolls / nominating candidates / setting polling booths / implementing model code / supervising Panchayat elections?

The Election Commission is the independent body the Constitution creates specifically so that the government in power cannot control how its own elections are conducted.

Many countries have no such independent authority at all — elections are simply run by the sitting government, which creates an obvious conflict of interest. India avoids this through Article 324(1) of the Constitution, which vests "the superintendence, direction and control" of preparing electoral rolls and conducting all elections to Parliament, the State Legislatures, and the offices of President and Vice-President in the Election Commission — language the Supreme Court has read broadly, giving the Commission a decisive say over nearly every aspect of the process. (Local body — Panchayat and Municipal — elections are, notably, outside its remit; those are run by separate State Election Commissioners.)

The Commission's own composition has changed over time — a single-member body until 1989, briefly multi-member around that election, then multi-member again from 1993 onward and unchanged since, once a dispute over how power was shared between the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) and the other Commissioners was settled by the Supreme Court. Today the CEC and the two other Election Commissioners hold equal decision-making power as a collective body; all three are appointed by the President on the Council of Ministers' advice (a process critics argue should also involve the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice, to prevent partisan appointments), and serve six years or until age 65. An ordinary Election Commissioner can be removed by the President, but a CEC has stronger protection — removable only if both Houses of Parliament recommend it by special majority — precisely so a ruling party cannot remove a CEC merely for refusing to favour it.

Its actual powers are extensive: maintaining accurate voter rolls; setting the entire election schedule; postponing or cancelling elections wherever conditions make a free and fair poll impossible; enforcing the model code of conduct; ordering re-polls or recounts; recognising parties and allotting symbols; and — despite having very little permanent staff of its own — taking full control of the government's administrative machinery for the duration of an election, including the power to transfer officials who fail to remain non-partisan. Over the decades it has grown visibly more assertive, from managing elections in militancy-affected regions to postponing polls after the 1991 Rajiv Gandhi assassination and the 2002 Gujarat violence (a postponement the Supreme Court upheld) — not because its constitutional powers grew, but because it began using powers it always had more fully.