Inspired by the recent referendum that was responsible for Aam Admi Party’s government formation in Delhi, Election commission of India took a decision to conduct the upcoming elections to 16th Lok Sabha using an SMS based voting mechanism. The Chief Election Commissioner today talking to the press said “ it’s easy to use and very popular mechanism in the India. Its horizontally scalable i.e. can easily enable a multi-party election”. The Election commission would also like to experiment a “missed call” based voting system in the near future. The benefits of this system would include larger participation and lower costs. According to a recent estimate, the government spent Rs 10000 Crores (1.6 Billion USD) of tax payers’ money in 2009. This number is expected to go up by 20% in 2014 election. With the proposed SMS based voting mechanism, the Govt estimates to reduce this expenditure by 70%.
This afternoon Shri Digvijay Singh, a top Congress party leader welcomed this decision and thanked Arvind Kejriwal for coming up with this innovation. Shri. Nitin Gadkari, leader of the BJP suggested that the some of the savings should be allocated to political parties as party fund. “This will bring complete transparency to the election funding process “said Gadkari and also expressed gratitude to AAP for coming up with such a system. The chief spokesperson of AAP, Sri Kumar Biswas told media persons that this innovation is not his party’s but it belongs to Aam Admi. He suggested that this model can be now implemented in parliament and state assemblies for various legislations. Shri Kumar Biswas also suggested that netas will no longer need to attend parliament with such a system in place. This indirectly reduces the number of lal batti gaadis and the problem of Govt Bungalows in Delhi.
Hower, Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav criticized this decision by the Election Commison (EC). “This is the best example of Crony Capitalism to benefit Telecom companies. Who is going to bear the SMS charges” he said. In response to Mr. Yadav’s criticism, EC responded that the amount spent on SMS can be easily transferred back to Citizens’s bank account by using the Adhar card subsidy model developed for LPG connection subsidies.
Election commission is already in talks with major IT companies for technology solutions. However, our sources confirmed that Sony TV offered to help by letting the Government use the software developed for popular reality show Indian Idol.
