A national shame

I have been living in India's millenium city of Gurgaon for the last 11
years, and seen three general elections-1998, 2004, and 2009. But I am really
ashamed to say that I have never been able to vote. Neither has my wife. And
there are about 240 other families in my building. A little cross-checking
shocked me even more-only about 13 families were registered with the Haryana
Election Commission voters list.

There may be lots of reasons for such low registration in my neighborhood,
but my story is this. In 1998 the local authorities set up a full day camp where
we spent several hours to submit our ID and residence proof, get ourselves
photographed for the voters ID card. Unfortunately, when we went to collect the
voter card on the designated day, we discovered that our photos were correct but
the names and addresses on the card were incorrect. Hence, no cards.

In 2004, we again got a public notice calling all voter ID card aspirants to
come to the Election Commission office and get their ID cards made. When we
reached we were told that a passport or ration card is not good enough ID proof,
and we must get a court afffidavit for that. It was a 15 minute job, of course
at the cost of about Rs 350 to get an affidavit. And after spending another half
a day to submit the papers and get ourselves photographed we came back home sure
that our voter ID card was guaranteed now. But that was not to be. When we went
to check again we were given a story that all the data entered in the computer
had got corrupted, hence no ID cards for a lot of people.

Ibrahim ahmad

For the 2009 general election we decided to take the 'jagore.com' route, a
private sector initiative to get people to vote by helping them get enlisted in
the voter list, at least. The process was easy and simple, and again after a
three hour long queue we finally submitted our papers, to the same office, for
the third time in 11 years. And we were told that we will not get the voter ID
card, but our name will be there in the voter list, and we could come and vote
on the election day. When we reached our polling booth all excited at the
prospect of becoming a voter again, we were told to search our name from a list
that was actually about 200 loose pages. And there were about 25 other people
trying to grab that list which had voter names in a particular order. If those
names had been in an alphabetic order, the search would have been so simple.

The reason behind this long story was to highlight that the Government of
India and the Election Commission either do not know about the power of
information technology or the national elections is not mission critical for
them. Obviously, judicious use of IT would not have solved all the problems, but
would definitely have saved election officials from giving such silly excuses. I
do not know if I should laugh or cry.

Ibrahim ahmad

ibrahima@cybermedia.co.in