If anybody wants to reform India, the first step is Election reforms! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Election process and voting are the most important pillars of democracy. If there is one single thing that we need to concentrate regarding election, that is the voter list. I am happy to read a senior IAS officer has written about this! I agree with the article fully, except the assumptions that she makes on the politicians. I will not put the blame on politicians. The voter list mechanism is complicated. Also, if the list is cleaned, nobody knows whom it will favor. So, the politicians doesnt want to ‘waste’ their time on that, and they go ahead with the existing voters list. The problems here are threefold. 1. SIMPLIFY: The complex procedure to register as voter. It was made in 1951 when the terms IT and Internet never existed in India! We need to take advantage of IT and simplify this procedure. It’s high time! 2. DECENTRALIZE: The process has to be decentralized and participative. Local committees having members from citizens and political parties must allowed to view and advise the officers on how the list is prepared. Now it’s left to the discretion of the officers only. They are poorly paid and have no interest in making a fool proof list! I know of cases where officials add and delete names sitting in their offices! And to punish them, one has to get permission from the Chief Electoral officer of the state!! I had written to delegate this to collectors 5 years back! I don’t think it has changed, also not the paltry remuneration the election official get to do this humongous work! 3. AWARENESS and make REGISTRATION COMPULSORY: Govt needs to create a huge wave of awareness on voting system and awareness. It should rope in private and NGOs in this effort. The ECI should run an efficient 24x7 call center at every state to respond to every query on this. They shall also make it mandatory that every person who stays in a location for more than 6 months, should register and get his name enrolled. Voting may not be compulsory, but, registration in voter list must be made compulsory! No citizen has any right to say that, he will not even register as a voter! Indeed I too wanted to write about the election system for long! Hence happy to see the article by an IAS officer. BTW, while I agree there are serious errors in the system, we can’t conclude that whole election is fully erroneous! Also the conclusion by the author seems to be misplaced when she doubts the voting percentage. She wonders how it can be 60% etc, when the error in the survey done y Jaanagraha showed that, only 50% are actually residing in the polling booth! She is probably missing the point that, in urban areas people migrate a lot, and its possible that, voters whose name is in the list must have migrated to neighboring booth area! But, they still can vote, if the migration is within 6 months! So, let’s concentrate our energy on cleaning the system. Will any NGO in Karnataka stand up to clean this system? I pledge all possible support. Thanks for the patient reading! Do give your comments in this important issue. The link to the Article which made me to write this post: https://facebook/raghunandan.tr/posts/738113039594047 (Where have all the votes gone? Renuka Vishwanathan, IAS.
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 06:15:42 +0000
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