IT ruling our lives:

Subas Pani, Deputy Election Commissioner, Government of India recently

presented an overview of how the election commission made judicious deployment

of IT in announcing election results to the citizens. He was speaking at an

e-governance workshop at Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT).

He pointed out the salient features of the ‘Electoral management and

administration’ system which is one of the most visible e-government

initiatives of the government as evident by the speed at which the Commission

counted the votes and announced the results. This speed must be seen in the

context of the scale of operation involving: over 7.5 lakh polling stations

distributed in 4,072 constituencies and 149 languages. Pani emphasised that the

election commission’s major IT initiatives were--computerization of the rolls,

integration of the Internet; website and online dissemination of information

during the counting of votes at polling booths spread all over India with

electronic photo identity cards.

Shashank Garg of Encore Software, discussed at length the salient features of

Simputer that has been referred by Prof MM Joshi in his various discussion as an

effective tool in its application in the rural sector. The Simputer is a low

cost mobile device that has been Simputer Trust which as a non-profit entity.