Project to make polls hi-tech gathers dust

The idea sounded great, but it just did not work. Politicians were not keen and the project suffered a setback when a court set aside the result of an assembly election in Kerala where the machines were tried out.

So, the machines remained in the godowns, their batteries dead. "We are busy with the conduct of elections now. I do not even know where the voting machines are lying," says Delhi’s Chief Electoral Officer O P Kelkar.

BEL and ECIL had dispatched to Delhi 1,004 EVMs out of their total production of 1,50,000 units. The EVMs were first stored in the office of the Chief Electoral Officer located in Kashmiri Gate. Later, since a fire broke out in one of the rooms of the building, the machines were shifted to a godown on Ansari Road, where they remain, sealed in dusty wooden cartons.

Senior officials in BEL, Bangalore, said they too had forgotten about the prestigious project since it goes back more than a decade. "There had been a lot of pressure on us to import the components from Japan and assemble the machines. But there appears to be no political will to use them on the ground," a BEL official said.

Chief Election Commissioner M S Gill said he had been pushing for the EVMs to be used in 30-odd select constituencies, but the early announcements of polls foiled the plans. "Some high-literacy constituencies like Chandigarh, Pondicherry, New Delhi and Goa are waiting to be tested for the machines but it is evident the political parties do not like the idea. We will now take up the matter after the elections," he said.

"The EVMs are something we inherited but they are not something we have abandoned," said Deputy Election Commissioner Subas Pani. "But there is a lot of apprehension about their use in the minds of the politicians. And the apprehension increased after the 1996 fiasco in Parliament when the EVM did not work."

The revive its ambitious programme, the Election Commission had held discussions on the use of EVM at a meeting held with political parties on May 7, 1997. The move to use the EVMs had been vehemently opposed by the Janata Dal and the Samata Party. The Janata Dal had said they were against the use of EVM in view of the large number of illiterate voters, even in urban areas. The Samata Party had pointed out that the EVM could give faulty results in case of power failure or tampering. Other parties said the EVMs’ upper limit of 64 candidates and 3,840 votes remained a severe handicap.

While BEL officials say "parallel" machines can be added, doubts remain. The reason is that the number of contestants has gone up sharply — the record being 480 contestants for a Lok Sabha constituency (Nalgonda, Andhra Pradesh) and 1,033 for the Assembly elections (Modakurichi, Tamil Nadu). Also, Gill admitted there were some "negative" aspects like erratic power supply. "When we use EVMs, we have to decide how many generators we want to keep stand-by. All these things have to be sorted out," he said.