 "P G Bhat")
On any given day, one can find PG Bhat, a 64-year-old former Navy commander in front of his laptop, its screen crowded with personal details of absolute strangers, using various techniques to check the probability of error in them. It is the country’s electoral rolls that Bhat has been scanning — the last word on a citizen’s ability to vote in an election. On one such day, sitting in the quiet of his house in the middle-class locality of Giri Nagar in South Bangalore, he found a 4,818-year-old man in the voter lists of Bangalore.
And there was more: over 13,000 voters had more than one wife, 1,829 had ‘female’ husbands, 502 were under 18 years of age and 96 were above 120 years along with hundreds of thousands of possible voters with two — even three records — spread across different constituencies in Karnataka. Shocked after discovering over 1 million instances of errors in the electoral rolls, Bhat took the Karnataka Election Commission to court and with some legal intervention managed to get many errors rectified before the assembly election earlier this year.
“I don’t see what I do as activism. I am not interested in shouting slogans or <I>gheraoing</I>,” says the soft-spoken Bhat. He might have a different term for it, but there is no getting away from the fact that for the past couple of years Bhat has devoted most of his energy and time — up to 12 hours a day — to the one-of-its-kind cause. “I don’t want to fight the system, I want to work with it.”
His persistence has left the Chief Election Commissioner’s (CEC) office with no other option but to engage him. Impressed and at times perplexed by his findings, CEC is now trying to clean up the electoral rolls of the entire country, based on regular inputs from Bhat. The state-owned National Informatics Centre has been directed to build a software on the lines of the one written by Bhat, an electrical engineer by training.
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Bhat’s tryst with voter awareness initiatives began during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. By then he had retired from his job in the software industry, which he had joined after leaving the Navy in 1996. With his background in engineering, he got involved with the technological aspects for Smart Vote, an apolitical group interviewing parliamentary candidates and posting the interviews online for voters to get to know them. During the municipal elections the following year, Bhat developed a tool to make voter information easily searchable on the state election commission website.
With the initiative getting the approval of both voters and the state election commission, Bhat wanted to repeat the exercise before the Assembly elections this year. While creating a database of 6.5 million voters, he found that the rolls of 27 “relatively urban” constituencies of Bangalore were strewn with mistakes. These were “rampant even, shameful, errors,” he quips, such as hundreds of voters aged above 120 years, and rampant duplication, where the same person has got multiple votes. This included VIPs, like Nandan Nilekani’s daughter, who had four votes. Such duplication leaves the field open for proxy voting. These errors, he says, can easily be rectified online.
Bhat reported them. In response, he says, the state election commission office deleted 800,000 voter records thinking “nobody would notice”. “The bureaucracy has contempt for feedback,” says Bhat, a graduate of the Naval College of Engineering and a native of Nirchal in Mangalore, a village that is yet to get electricity. “They don’t want a vigilant citizen to engage with the system.” The reason stated for the deletion was “shifted residence,” says Bhat, but “I knew that was not true. “On my own street, names of 50 people who were still around, paying taxes, etc, were deleted.”
When long correspondence with the officials and meetings yielded no results, Bhat filed a public interest litigation in the Karnataka High Court with the help of a not-for-profit organisation and an election candidate, and got a favourable judgment. Victory may have been sweet but it did not last long. “In the meantime, they had deleted another 500,000 voters in December, including me, my wife and my daughter, even though I was going to the CEO’s office frequently!” he says. And so the struggle continues.
With a little help from the CEC office and court’s intervention, Bhat was able to get most of the deleted records restored along with significant other errors corrected. Some still remain. Out of the four records of Nilekani’s daughter, only two have been deleted, Bhat says. And the wife of a sitting member of the legislative assembly, BA Basavaraj of KR Puram, has still got three votes, he says, quoting the serial numbers of the voter identity which he knows by heart.
Bhat, who avers that his main interest is education (he teaches software analysis, design and architecture twice a week at National College, Basavangudi), is currently combing the lists of 13 states, including Delhi. He has been roped in now by the poll panel to vet the rolls of the entire country. “We thought instead of reacting in an egoistic manner, let’s use the opportunity to improve our rolls,” Alok Shukla, deputy election commissioner, told Business Standard. Electoral rolls of most states have flagrant errors, though Delhi’s rolls are in relatively better shape.
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There is “nothing complicated” about what he does, Bhat says “it’s just reverse engineering”. He extracts text from the PDF voter rolls and creates his own database, akin to what the states may have in their central servers. He writes common parser program for it and then uses tools to build patterns from the information available throwing up possible errors. For instance, he uses phonetics to check for records of the same people which may have been spelled differently.
He routinely shares findings with the state election commission offices. Some are open to his feedback, others less so. Delhi has been the most forthcoming, making him an active partner in improving the quality of state’s rolls, and so has Karnataka after some initial resistance. The chief electoral officer of Karnataka, Anil Kumar Jha, says the software has been improved to deter obvious mistakes such as voters below 18 years or above 100 from finding their way into the rolls. A tool has been developed to warn data entry operators in case a name which is similar to the ones already present is entered. In the pipeline is a feature which will match voter photos to weed out duplicates. Niraj Bharti, the additional chief electoral officer (IT) of Delhi, says the Delhi election commission office too has upgraded its software to include these features, while a text message-based application was unveiled in July this year for voters to check their details.
However, both Jha and Bharti explain that they can’t just “wish errors away”. Even if the record of a voter states his age is 1969 years which would be his date of birth, it is only after physical verification that we can correct the record, says Jha. “And this takes time,” he adds. Bharti couldn’t agree more but adds that Bhat has “sensitised people to the issue”.
Ask Bhat what he stands to gain out of his campaign, which includes waging a war against the Karnataka election commission and devoting most of his waking hours in finding errors in the records of people he will probably never meet, and he says matter-of-factly, “It keeps me agile, gives meaning to my life. I’ve always thought we can improve our efficiency and reduce human misery with the right tools and purposes. This is one of those ventures,” he adds. Bhat says that though he can’t claim that Karnataka and Delhi voter lists are cleaner only because of his intervention, things have significantly improved, which makes him proud. “I am also at an age where I have the choice to do what I want to do, I don’t have any obligation… It’s a good situation.”
His only daughter is a dentist, and married. Ask him how his wife reacts to his activist streak and he laughs, saying she does not interfere. “Once in a while, when somebody interviews me, she feels very happy… Typical middle-class sentiments.”
