For poll panel, it’s a job well done

Five poll officers walked 40 km — the distance from Manesar in Haryana to Rajiv Chowk in Delhi — in the snow bound hills of Zanskar, Western Ladakh, on Tuesday to ensure that a total of 37 people got to cast their votes in the last phase on April 13.

Updated on: May 14, 2009, 01:19:19 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Five poll officers walked 40 km — the distance from Manesar in Haryana to Rajiv Chowk in Delhi — in the snow bound hills of Zanskar, Western Ladakh, on Tuesday to ensure that a total of 37 people got to cast their votes in the last phase on April 13.

A polling station was set up for a lone voter, Bharat Shah, in Gujarat’s Gir Forest. Six mobile booths moved from one hamlet to another in Rajasthan’s desert districts of Barmer and Jaisalmer, bringing democracy close to people’s homes.

The length and breadth of the country posed many more such challenges, but after their two month long polling exercise divided into five phases, one fact is already indubitable: even before the votes have been counted on May 16, there is a clear winner — the Election Commission.

Consider the staggering statistics: over 70 lakh officials were employed to enable an electorate of 71.4 crore people to vote.

“This is more than the combined population of Northern America and Europe,” said Laxmana Dalmia, who has made a documentary on the election campaign. A total of 8070 candidates from 390 political parties, apart from independents, contested 543 seats.

Over 100 fax machines and 50 computers, installed across a number of large halls, receive reports from over 2,400 central election observers as well as the complaints sent in by political parties and contestants.

“Every such report was taken notice of. Nothing goes ignored here,” said S.Y. Quraishi, election commissioner.

Despite the Naxal blitzkrieg in the first phase of polling, election related violence was markedly less this time than in earlier general elections. “Violence fell by 60-70 per cent compared to the 2004 Lok Sabha poll,” said J.P. Prakash. “Even the number of booths where repelling was required, were far less.”

Problems, however, remain. Despite the official curbs on expenditure and the model code of conduct imposed, the poll panel is aware it has not been able to effectively check the use of money power to influence voters. “We will have to do something to control misuse of money,” said Quraishi.

Around Rs 40 crore were seized in raids during the campaign. “We are looking at reforms to have even cleaner polls in future,” said Quraishi.

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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