The Hindu Business Line : BEL bags Rs 100-cr order for voting machines

Voting orders: The CMD of BEL, Mr V.V.R. Shasry (left), and the Chief Election Commissioner, Mr N. Gopalaswami, at the Mass Manufacturing Facility at BEL in Bangalore on Tuesday. —

Our Bureau

Bangalore, Sept. 30

The Election Commission, which has just placed a Rs 100-crore-plus order for 1.02 lakh electronic voting machines with Bharat Electronics Ltd, is looking at innovations in it such as fingerprint recognition, ‘Totaliser’ or counting from many networked machines and perhaps Internet voting, according to the Chief Election Commissioner, Mr N. Gopalaswami.

The 1.02 lakh machines form a bulk of the EC’s immediate requirement of 1.8 lakh machines for the next general elections and polls in 4-5 States. The first batch of 5,000 was despatched on Tuesday. Any new feature would have to be approved by political parties and backed by suitable amendments to the Representation of the People Act.

The EC has ordered the rest from another PSU, Electronics Corporation of India Ltd. The EC deployed 10 lakh machines in 2004 and now the number of polling stations has gone up 15 per cent to 8 lakh, he said.

The BEL’s CMD, Mr V.V.R. Sastry, said the EVMs would be delivered over the next two months.

Mr Gopalaswami inaugurated the upgraded mass manufacturing facility (MMF) where the voting machines are assembled.

Mr Sastry said some EVM export orders were in the offing from neighbouring countries and Africa but did not elaborate. Five lakh EVMs have been supplied by BEL since the first one rolled out in 1989 and were used across the country in 2004. It has also developed the ‘totaliser’ option by which EC can pool and count votes from multiple booths in violence-prone constituencies.

The EVM is a key but periodic civil product of the defence PSU, which had a revenue of Rs 4,100 crore in 2007-08, with a civil portfolio worth around Rs 1,000 crore, according to a company source.

The MMF, set up in 1989, has been modernised at a cost of nearly Rs 8 crore. Mr Sastry said the defence PSU expected to use the facility to meet any offset orders that may come from aerospace majors when the large defence deals – in particular, the multi-role fighter aircraft – were finalised in the coming years. BEL has signed preparatory pacts with Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman for offset-related tie-ups.

Mr Gopalaswami said the EVMs, with five-year memory, had proved to be neutral, rigging-proof and had rested the fears of political parties. “If you want to win elections, question the EVMs,” he said in jest, citing a few instances when candidates disbelieving the machine had won.

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