Electoral Roll Management System (ERMS) aims to leverage the use of voter’s data/electoral rolls generated by Election Commission of India (ECI) during Parliament and State Assembly elections for the purpose of Panchayat/ Urban Local Bodies elections, thus thwarting the duplicacy in efforts, time and money invested by the State Election Commission.
In the year 2010, State Election Commission (SEC), Himachal Pradesh took an initiative to reuse electronic data created by Election Commission of India (ECI) while preparing electoral rolls to conduct elections for Parliament and HP State Legislative Assembly. This electronic data was adopted so as to produce working copy of Draft Electoral Rolls of SEC to conduct elections for Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRI) and Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) in the state of Himachal Pradesh.
In the past, as a part of conventional process, the State Election Commission (SEC), Himachal Pradesh has been involved in conducting house to house enumeration for a period of fifteen days whenever elections were declared for Panchayats and Urban Local Bodies. These Enumeration Forms were converted into Manuscript Draft Electoral Rolls over a period of three days. Another ten days were then devoted to publish the hand written copies for inviting claims and objections from general public. After incorporating all the changes including claims and objections, the final electoral rolls were outsourced to the printing press for accomplishing the publication process. In the last lag, proof reading of the rolls was carried out by the field staff before final copies were printed and stitched.
A similar process was followed by the Election Commission of India (ECI) for which a huge investment was made in terms of manpower, time, stationery and money. With advancements in technology, ECI started using various ICT tools for expediting the election process. As a part of this exercise, electoral rolls are made available in the electronic, searchable format, on the Internet carrying photos and ID card details of the voters. The existing rolls are updated on timely basis, thus downsizing the conventional labour intensive process, checking on the wastage of time and public money. While preparing electoral rolls, ECI uses the top most locational parameter as Parliamentary Constituency which is composed of one or more Assembly Constituencies (AC) and each AC is further divided into parts and each of these parts comprises of multiple sections. As a part of ERMS in Himachal Pradesh, the control tables obtained from ECI were modified to include Panchayat against each section. Once each section was mapped with Panchayat, working copy of electoral rolls were generated - Panchayat, section wise, leaving ward number as the collectable parameter. Field level enumeration was carried out to fill ward number against each voter thereby generating the draft rolls. These draft rolls were then further processed by incorporating all the changes due to claims and objections, leading to generation of final electoral rolls. Final electoral rolls were then published on the Internet (http://himachal.nic.in) in searchable format. In Phase-I of the exercise, fresh data was obtained from ECI, electors were mapped to Panchayats/ wards based on the existing SEC data and working rolls were generated for the new voters. NIC State Centre, Himachal Pradesh developed the Electoral Rolls Management System software, which was rolled out in the state and with the pro-active support of the District Informatics Centres of NIC, data updation/addition was carried out within a short span of 15 days.
VISION STATEMENT OF SHRI DEV SWARUP State Election Commissioner Himachal Pradesh
“Electoral India is one. Therefore, electors’ data should also be one. This database should be useable to generate draft electoral rolls for all elections”.
Shri Dev Swarup joined the Commission in 2009 and he has been the driving force behind convincing the ECI for the ERMS initiative. An HP Cadre Civil Services officer, Shri Dev Swaroop has worked for different positions at GoI. The rich experience which he carried along has motivated him to take up the ERMS initiative. He was all praise for the NIC State Centre team in providing him the desired software support in making his dream come true.
He realized that while the laws governing all elections were similar, dual efforts, time, resources, money were being wasted in creating separate electoral rolls for PRI/ ULB elections. He found a previous reference from ECI dated 4-July-2005 where the ECI has allowed use of its database to SECs. However, no state has done any further work in this regard. Therefore, in 2010, he decided to stop the door-to-door enumeration in Himachal Pradesh and started the ERMS initiative based on ECI data.
In Phase-II of the initiative, the State Election Commissioner, Himachal Pradesh made a presentation in front of ECI on 26th September 2013 for modification of the control tables of ECI database in order to correctly generate PRI/ULB ward wise draft rolls directly from the ECI database. This is to be without any further need to get a copy of ECI database and modify the same at the time of elections. The process involves incorporating additional parameters as per SEC requirements in the control tables of ECI. Once this is achieved, the data will flow both ways in comparison to unilateral flow of data earlier. Moreover, single electoral roll database will serve the purpose of conducting all type of elections, starting from Parliamentary Elections to PRI/ULB ward representative elections.
On 25th November, 2013, during the All India Conference of State Election Commissioners, Shri Dev Swarup made a presentation on Common Database Usability to generate draft electoral rolls of the SECs, which was appreciated by all the participating SECs. He shared his experiences with the Election Commission of India. The Chairman of the Conference- Shri P. Ramakanth Reddy, SEC, Andhra Pradesh stated that the other SECs could also adopt the solution of SEC HP as a model/prototype for their respective states.
In January 2014, the ECI has granted permission to not only utilize the ECI database but also directed Chief Election Officers to add additional blank columns for Panchayat, Municipal bodies and wards provided that such data for incorporation would be collected and entered by the SEC of the states concerned. This ensures that ECI electoral roll database will be used for PRI/ULB elections too and all the states of the country will be finally following a similar model through their respective State Election Commissions. This has finally set the ball rolling for the Phase-II of ERMS!
For further information: AJAY SINGH CHAHAL State Informatics Officer National Informatics Centre State HP Secretariat, Shimla-171002 Phone: 0177-2624045 Email: sio-hp@nic.in