The Hindu Business Line : Streamline voting at LS Secretariat

All who waited for the results of the trust vote in Parliament on Tuesday were perhaps as astounded by the time it took the Lok Sabha secretariat to count the 540-odd votes as by the revolting exhibition of the behind-the-scenes sleaze. The Prime Minister and all the Ministers, apart from the rest of the country, had to wait a good hour for the officials to tally manually all the votes cast in the poll.

It is a simple matter for a digital system to be set up to record such votes. The fact that the country’s 60- crore voters manage to record their votes in the general elections relatively accurately, thanks to ECIL and BHEL and the 600 district magistrates and their colleagues, who actually conduct the elections in the entire country shows up the Lok Sabha administration’s lack of contact with the real world of development and technology. As a result, the technology used in the House is generations behind the general level of technical capability in the country, which is a globally sought-after IT outsourcing destination.

Even in the general elections, where there are a minimum of fifteen lakhs voters for each MP and 1.5 lakh voters for each MLA, voter’s data are made available to each contestant and the officials who conduct the polls. They and the over five thousand policemen deployed are trained and retrained to avoid mistakes.

All this is due to the neutral efficiency of the IAS, police, Customs and Revenue services. The fierce independence of the ECI needs to be commended in this context.

Its professional efficiency is an example for the Lok Sabha secretariat. The electronic and digital divisions of the ECI have some of the best minds in the country. In this background, it is sad to see the clerks of the Lok Sabha count the votes “chad by chad”. One hopes this procedure will soon be streamlined.

B. Ashok Mussoorie