HYDERABAD: Contrary to Telangana Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Rajat Kumar’s claim that voter deletions were taken up systematically in Hyderabad before the Assembly polls, the response to an RTI query has brought to the fore a letter from 2015 in which the former CEO had flagged the extreme shortage of officials and said door-to-door verification had not been done properly under the National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP) -- a controversial drive to use Aadhaar-related software developed by the UIDAI to weed out “duplicate and bogus” entries in electoral rolls.
It is important to note that NERPAP was implemented till August 11, 2015, after which the Supreme Court put it on hold while adjudicating the constitutional validity of Aadhaar. However, by then, over 20 lakh names had already allegedly been deleted from the electoral rolls in Telangana alone. Tech experts and activists have repeatedly called out the algorithm used by the NERPAP software which is “riddled with flaws”. The former CEO’s admission that there were not enough officials to overlook NERPAP and that “door to door verification has not been conducted properly” is an indication that it relied heavily on just the software to delete names off the voters list.
The missive written on August 8, 2015, furnished in response to an RTI filed by city-based security researcher Srinivas Kodali, was written by former AP and TS CEO Bhanwar Lal and addressed to Secretary of Election Commission of India Sumit Mukherji. Lal had written the letter as a followup to a meeting he had with Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao during which they discussed the “poor” implementation of NERPAP in the “area of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation” when compared to the rest of the State.
“... in 24 Assembly constituencies of GHMC area, on the day of my discussion with the Chief Minister on 20.7.2015, it was 35% and now it is 45%... This shows that there is poor progress of the programme in GHMC area and the door-to-door verification has not been conducted properly. There are many complaints stating that BLOs have not visited their houses in the GHMC area...” Lal wrote raising the issue with the then GHMC commissioner, “but there was no fruitful result”.
The 5-page letter pointed out to Secretary Mukherji that there was a lack of employees in his office and that he had raised the issue with the State government several times. “The Commission has also sanctioned staffing pattern for the offices of the Chief Electoral Officer, District Election Officers and ERO/RO in the month of March 2014 and revised in September, 2014. Accordingly, required proposals have been submitted to the State Government for sanction of posts, but the State Government has not cleared the proposal till date in spite of the letter of the Chief Election Commissioner to the Chief Secretary of the Government.”
Lal highlighted the lack of staff in his office when he said, “The Telangana State Government has provided only two sections for O/o.CEO, Telangana..and one Officer.. Out of 2 SOs, one post is vacant and out 4 ASOs, 2 posts are vacant. Thus the staff provided are not at all sufficient to cope up with the work load.” He mentioned that he had taken up the matter with the Chief Secretary. “The issue has been highlighted before the CS several times with a request to provide the staff as per the staffing pattern sanctioned by commission, but in vain,” the letter said.
The problem with the software lies in the algorithm that it used. According to Huffington Post, an algorithm developed by UIDAI used to scan electoral rolls and match them with Aadhar databases, comparing names, date of birth and address pin codes was not full proof, as a voter who was registered as S Siva could be named Siva Srinivas in the Aadhar database. For matches above 50%, the software linked the Aadhar number and voter id of those below 50% were flagged as needing verification, the article noted.
Word of caution
The 5-page letter pointed out to Secretary of Election Commission of India Sumit Mukherji that there was a lack of employees in his office and that he had raised the issue with the State government several times