In the widely circulated story of free and fair polls in Jammu and Kashmir, one chapter has rarely been told. Of how 55 anonymous staffers of the Uttar Pradesh Urdu Academy sat down with 200 data-entry operators to pull off an unprecedented counting exercise in Indian democracy: building a computerised data base of 60 lakh names and addresses of the voters in the state—in Urdu.They had to start from scratch: from searching for a database package that could read the Urdu script to choosing the right font that voters can easily read. All in less than five months.So led by Chief Electoral Officer of Uttar Pradesh Noor Mohammed who also heads the Urdu Academy, the staff first fanned out with samples of voters’ lists. ‘‘A software to transcribe in Urdu is very rare,’’ says Mohammed, ‘‘so it took us a while to locate the company.’’The choice of the font was also a factor. ‘‘It was important to use the right typeface to make the voters list easily understandable. For instance, we could not opt for the Kufi style or the Nasq style because it is very fine print,’’ says Mohammed.It was a Delhi-based software company that came up with Noori Nasthalak, a package with fonts in Urdu that could print out voters’ slips. Cost: Rs 6 lakh for the software, Rs 5 lakh for the source code.For S J Raj, vice-president of the company that came up with the package, this was a job right up his street. ‘‘We had done such softwares in Chinese and Arabic.Urdu is different because here one word does not have more than one meaning and the words are complicated. So we got Urdu experts,” Raj says.Once the software was with us, ‘‘half of the job was done,’’ says Noor Mohammed. While this was on, voters lists dating back to 1988 were being collected by EC teams from all the 87 constituencies in J&K and brought to Lucknow and Kanpur. Along with supplementary lists.These were then fed into the computer at 15 centres checked for errors, then taken back to the districts and checked on the field.EC officials say credit goes to the people who fed every one of the 60 lakh names into the computer. Acting chairman of UP Urdu Academy Shahidullah Khan is modest over the achievement: ‘‘Though we were not used to such work, I am happy we managed to complete it in time for the EC.’’The task of tallying the lists was made easier by 2,200 teachers and Urdu translators who were sent as election officers to J-K. For the record, each election officer was paid Rs 15,000 for three phases of the election with an insurance cover for life of Rs 10 lakh. For a task that was priceless.Says Deputy Election Commissioner Sayan Chatterjee: ‘‘It was one of the most painstaking jobs ever done. The Urdu Academy put in hard work. It was crucial because only after the rolls were computerised that we could issue the voters’ slips.’’
