MUMBAI: An initiative in Mahrashtra is poised to change the way elections are conducted in the country. Among the 10 civic bodies that go to polls this February, Thane city will stray from the normal practice of locking up the ballot boxes and collecting them at a centralised place for counting. Thane city instead would declare the results barely two hours after the polling would have ended. This would be made possible with the extensive of use of Information Technology and Geographical Information System (GIS).
When Maharashtra State Election Commissioner Neela Satyanarayan broached the idea of using technology to declare results on the same day of elections there were no takers with the exception of Thane. What made Thane Municipal Commissioner R A Rajeev volunteer was the availability of IT infrastructure done on the GIS front. “We had already covered the entire city with GIS-based software that enabled us to geo-reference all utilities. Making the results declared on the same day of voting was mere extension of this technology already had by us. We are anticipating a saving of `50 lakh by adopting this method,” said Rajeev. All Thane city had to do was feed the information of the 12 lakh voters into the GIS-based system. The system knows information related to the number of male/female voters in any area.
The pathbreaking concept appears simple in principle but the underlying process is complex. To make this happen in safe and secure environment thereby fulfilling the motto of conducting free and fair elections, polling officers in the 1,500 booths, spread across 65 wards, would be handed a special SIM card that would permit sending of encrypted data by SMS only to the central server. The phone with special SIM card would only permit two-way communication with the central server and no calls could be made from it. The central server would not accept SMS sent by ordinary SIM cards.
A pre-formatted SMS would be issued by the central server to all the polling officers who would have to fill in numbers in the fields and send it back to the control room. Before the counting, the polling officers would be only sending data related to the votes polled. The central server would be collating the data from polling officers and G-ELECT software would do arithmetic and display the voter turnout in wards in the control room. After polling is over, a new pre-formatted SMS would be sent by the central server to receive the votes polled by the candidates from polling booths. Though the central server would have numbers crunched for all 130 candidates by 6.30 pm, results would be declared after the zonal returning officers receive the hard copy of the counting from the polling officers. The returning officers would compare the sheets and with the online data and thus in two hours after the elections get over the results would be declared.
Besides expediting the declaration of the results, GIS-based system also facilitates monitoring of the progress of the elections.