Elections: Then & now

That the switch from ballot paper to electronic voting machine has transformed the face of Indian elections is well known. But in the years since Independence, elections have changed in other ways as well.

Updated on: May 16, 2009, 24:05:21 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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That the switch from ballot paper to electronic voting machine has transformed the face of Indian elections is well known. But in the years since Independence, elections have changed in other ways as well.

Across the 15 Lok Sabha elections between 1951 and 2009, the number of polling and security staff has increased more than 12 times.

In 1951, the first chief election commissioner employed 16,000 clerks on contract for six months to prepare the electoral rolls for India’s first general election. Today, 13 lakh government officials do the job of updating them in a month before each election.

On Saturday, around 200 Indian news channels, apart from over 100 websites and giant electronic screens, will blare forth the results.

But right up to the 1980s, the only sources of election news while counting was on, were All India Radio and Doordarshan. (Before television in the 1970s, it was just AIR.)

“Unlike now, when election news runs without a break, there were only periodic news bulletins then,” recalled veteran radio commentator Jasdev Singh.

Those really interested and living in district headquarters could, however, hang around outside the counting centre. The results at that centre alone, would be put up on a large blackboard outside, and periodically updated.

Before the arrival of EVMs in the late 1990s — its use was universalised only in the 2004 poll — manual counting of ballot papers took two to three days. In 1951, with an electorate one-third the size of the present, counting had taken four days. Now results are known the same evening.

“Till the EVMs arrived, each ballot had to be physically taken out of the box, shown to counting agents, and then counted,” said K.J. Rao, who spent 25 years at the EC before retiring in 2005. “Now press a button and you get the number of votes polled by each candidate in each booth."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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