My daughter is a first-time voter, one of the millions expected to transform the demographic contours of the 2014 election. But if the harrowing experience that we have faced in getting her registered is anything to go by, the expected surge in the number of voters may be more of a myth than reality.
Yesterday (March 9, 2014) was the last registration camp being held to bring more people into the voters list. Several centres had been set up across the city and the one designated for my area was set up at a local school in Hiranandani Gardens, Powai(Mumbai). I got there at 11-30 am. The floor was strewn with papers and the place was humming with the sound of hundreds of people asking questions that elicited no answers. After asking several people, we finally found that the centre had run out of forms. One volunteer informed us that they had got 300 forms and all were taken. Why, when the population that the centre caters to is several thousand strong, were there so few forms?
The option was to download the form from https://bsmedia.business-standard.comeci.nic.in/eci/eci.html and come back to the centre. We trooped back home, logged on to the site and clicked on a large icon which said: Enrol Now, Become a Voter. The site crashed. After several attempts, a page opened up which asked us for the details of our constituency and took in our mobile number and email id. Almost instantly a code was delivered to the message inbox on our phone. We keyed in the code into the login box on the site, as instructed. The site crashed, again and again. Finally, it came back but asked for information that I had submitted earlier. I re-entered the details only to be rejected by a message that I had submitted my information in duplicate. Could the Election Commission not have debugged the registration software before unleashing it upon us?
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Back to the centre, no forms still. But after some more running around and badgering people for spare forms, a stack was discovered under the chair of one of the government officers present at the centre. She handed them out grudgingly, muttering about how late in the day it was. It was 4.00 pm. We had spent the entire day just trying to get hold of a form.
The form filled out and duly attested, we found ourselves at the end of a long queue. We stood tapping our feet impatiently when a murmur snaked itself through the crowd—all those from locality A would not be able to submit their forms at this centre. Commotion and shouting followed and while some of us stood our ground, a few left disgustedly.
The lady officer in charge of registrations bellowed that we were all wasting our time and that we should go home. When I asked why we were not informed about this earlier, the question was met with a glare. After a while, the lady officer walked down the queue, shouting that it was already 5 pm and what were we thinking by standing there expecting her to accept our submissions. ‘Main aap logon pe daya kar rahi hoon. Aapke forms leke’ (I am doing you a favour by accepting your forms) she said as she snatched them out of our hands. When I asked for time to staple these into a bunch, she threw my set of documents on the floor. I lost my cool and said that neither was she doing me a favour nor did I want one. She denied immediately that she had been rude or unreasonable and grudgingly took my documents, bundling them into a sheaf. No more questions or comments were allowed and we were shooed away. I was not given a receipt, nor was I told what I needed to do next.
For all those who talk about apathetic voters, I would request them to get out into the field and understand that it is the callousness of the state that has disenfranchised citizens of the country, not apathy.