India has
made amazing progress in computerization. Look at what digital wallets have
achieved in the last three years. Railway computerization, Banking
Computerization, e-Commerce portals are examples of world class computerization.
You cannot, however, put election related computerization in that list. Is it
because the job is neither the central government’s nor that of the state
governments? Is it because a lot of the work is done by staff whose daytime
jobs have nothing to do with handling election data? Is it because you can fob
off thousands of complaints with excuses more easily than you can do in
railways or in banks? Whatever be the answer, the challenge of reliable
computerization of election data is a task ahead of us rather than behind us.
There is no
denying the magnitude of the task, particularly when data is recorded in
multiple scripts, and there is probably no central computerization. A tradition
of quality audit seems to be unheard of in the software implementation. The
user interfaces leave a lot to be desired. Data is not accessible for
verification and updating/corrections on a continuous basis. Once the borrowed
staff go away, there is no way to maintain the data till the next election arrives.
My wife
whose name was not on the rolls, though she has a valid Voter ID Card. She has
been told to wait till May 25 and fill up a form, and submit it with
photographs and a copy of her Aadhaar card. Hasn’t the judiciary put limits on
purposes for which you can demand an Aadhaar ID?
Visit the
following article that talks of 1.35 million voters being deleted from the rolls
in one city and 6.5 million voters being deleted in a state! Did they inform the
people concerned?
What is the
total number of voters that have been denied their votes in this election? I am
sure they would say “We do not keep track of the complaints made at the voting
booths, Sir!”
The number could
be in excess of ten million, if you go by examples given in the quoted article.
Let me make
a suggestion. Every bank keeps mobile numbers of its customers. If the customer
registers for it, every deposit and withdrawal from their account is reported
to them within minutes. Could not the system inform 1.35 million voters in a city
who are being deleted from the rolls through SMS? Tell them what is missing,
and how to get this rectified.
When the
number of voters who get their names deleted is large, people will easily believe
that there are mala fide deletions in plenty.
Srinivasan
Ramani
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