Election Commission casts Net wide, polling to go live

The next YouTube hit may well be the Indian elections. The Election Commission is taking the polls online and plans to webcast voting live from most of the 1.4 million polling stations across the country.

Updated on: Mar 31, 2014, 24:29:45 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The next YouTube hit may well be the Indian elections.

The Election Commission is taking the polls online and plans to webcast voting live from most of the 1.4 million polling stations across the country.

Aimed at ensuring transparency, the poll watchdog has instructed its officers to use YouTube–like free video-streaming websites for real-time telecast on all the nine polling days. April 7 is the first day of polling and May 12 the last.

“We are taking transparency to a different level...rather global. No country in the world has used the digital space as we would this time,” the EC official behind the move told HT on condition of anonymity. It will also help close monitoring of constituencies identified as “sensitive”.

Webcasting is the obvious second step as video-recording of polling is mandatory. With booths as far as in Ladakh and in remote jungles of Chhattisgarh, live streaming won’t be possible for all areas, but for other polling stations, officials have been asked to ensure landline or mobile broadband connections.

The officers have also been asked to rent or borrow video cameras — from government offices, district officials and even schools. The cameras would be connected to computers, laptops or tablets — any device with internet connection for the webcast.

Internet companies, too, stand to gain, as they are likely to see heavy traffic on polling days. Social media companies were expected to earn `500 crore, with political parties making poll pitch in virtual world as well, news agency PTI said. Of the 814 million Indian voters, around 200m have access to internet and half of them are active on social media.

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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