NEW DELHI, Aug 13: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s beleaguered United Progressive Alliance (UPA) will be a clear winner if India goes for mid-term polls any time soon, a major survey published on Sunday said.

It said the UPA government was besieged by many problems not the least of which was the dismissal of the foreign minister who was tarred by the Volcker report, controversial measures proposed for caste-based affirmative action, farmers’ suicides and rising prices.

But, the survey said there was good news too for the UPA.

“Had a Lok Sabha election been held in the first week of August, the UPA would have won a comfortable majority on its own,” the survey by Hindu newspaper and IBN-CNN TV channel said.

It said the ruling coalition’s tally could have crossed 300 seats, substantially more than the 222 the Congress and its allies won in the 2004 elections.

This gain is mainly at the expense of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

An election in August would have seen the NDA’s tally reduced from 189 seats in the last elections to only 120.

These are the main findings of the sponsored survey conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

The poll, conducted between August 1 and 6, is based on interviews with 14,680 respondents.