Sudhir Pansare has been working with the state Education Department for the past 24 years. During this period he has been on election duty seven times and he has been able to vote only twice. With random posting for election duty becoming the norm during the Lok Sabha polls,many of Pansares younger colleagues may not get to vote even once by the time they put in as much service. Reason: the government has started a process called randomisation wherein those on election duty will move further away from their own cities. The work of government staff on poll duty includes voter registration,verification of data and documentation along with their routine work. We are still expected to finish our routine jobs in addition to the election duty. With the voter registration drive on,almost all my staff work till midnight. There are no holidays. We work even on weekly offs. There is no question filling up forms for postal ballot as there is simply no time, said Geeta Dalvi,election nayab tahsildar,Pune Cantonment. Not many take that extra effort though. Less than 20 per cent of the government employees on election duty go out of the way and complete the lengthy formalities required for voting through postal ballet paper. But this is far from simple as the pre-requisites include attestation by gazetted officers,tracking the voting number from the original ward and few other things that make the going tough even for die-hard voters, said Pradeep Patil,electoral registration officer. The district has 21 constituencies and over 40,000 state government employees are put on compulsory election duty during the polls. Going by the past record,this means around 32,000 of these are non-starters as voters. If one were to apply same logic at a state-level,where the number of government employees is 21 lakh,it would mean that the number of non-voters from this segment is as high as 16 lakh. A day after the dates for the Assembly polls were declared,the state government employees who have been on the voter registration duty for the past two months were left wondering whether they would get an opportunity to execute their democratic right on October 13. We have requested the election commission to limit randomisation to the same constituency so that booth-level officers can vote from their respective toll booths as the candidates are the same at all the toll booths in the same constituency, said Varsha Untwal,deputy collector,election commission,Pune division. Many of the employees have questioned the necessity of randomisation given the fact that electronic voting machines are calibrated to ensure foolproof voting process. But the election commission seems convinced about the infallibility of randomisation. It is a decision taken by the election commission to maintain a foolproof voting process and there are no chances of it being limited to one constituency. We have the postal ballot paper system in place where the government employees on election duty can register their votes via post, said Debashish Chakraborty,chief electoral officer.
