Advocating a multi-purpose national identity card for Indians, Election Commissioner S Y Qureshi has said the Indian government was keen to introduce the concept to better manage citizen identity and national security issues.
"We have been pressing the Government of India to have a National Identity Card. There is serious thinking to have a Single Multipurpose national Identity Cards," Qureshi said here at an interactive Session at the House of Commons.
The idea of a Multipurpose National Identity Card (MNIC) was mooted by the Vajpayee-led NDA government in 2002, and later taken up by the UPA government.
Aimed at addressing national security, the problem of illegal immigration and managing citizen identity, the project has been set in motion by the government which approved the setting up of a National Authority for Unique Identity under Planning Commission to oversee it.
Delivering a lecture on the recent elections in India, Qureshi said while in the last elections 82 per cent of the 714 million voters were provided ID cards, in the next election 100 per cent voters would be covered.
Asked why the election was a "too long-drawn affair" with polling spread over five phases lasting nearly a month, Qureshi said: "If we had enough security forces, we can hold the elections in one day."
The Commission, Qureshi said, deliberately held polls in the Maoist and Naxal affected areas in the first phase itself.
"The logic was that in the first phase we could give the security forces three to four weeks time to go to the area, understand the area and conduct the elections," he said.
Polling time in such areas was also restricted from 7 am to 3 pm to enable polling parties to return during day time to safer areas and be evacuated by helicopter.
After the successful introduction of Electronic Voting Machines in India, Qureshi said, the Commission has received a lot of delegations from across the world.
"We are happy to share our technology to any democratic country," he said, at the lecture chaired by Indian-origin Labour MP Virendra Sharma in the presence of the Indian High Commissioner to UK, Shiv Shanker Mukherjee.
The Election Commissioner said polls in India were quite "cost effective" and the entire general election cost only about $180 million - a few pence per vote.
To a demand that NRIs should be allowed to vote in Indian elections, he said: "may be someday." But under the existing Representation of the People Act, one has to be an Indian resident to get the right to vote.
On the question of barring candidates with criminal records, Qureshi said the electoral body was keen to see such candidates against whom courts have framed charges and sentenced for more than five years barred from contesting elections. The matter is however pending before Parliament. "We have no powers to disqualify (anyone). A suggestion to that effect was rejected by a Parliamentary Committee as political rivals might file bogus cases to get their rivals disqualified," he said.
On Jammu and Kashmir, Qureshi said barring a solitary case, the election was peaceful in the state.
With eight million people deployed for the election process, including security forces, the Commission also made sure there was a mode of communication at every booth through 'communication for election tracking'.
"Each booth has to have a mode of communication so that we get to know within 10 minutes if anything goes wrong. This is something we tried for the first time in 2009," he said.
To prevent intimidation of weaker sections during polls, the electoral body introduced 'vulnerability mapping'.
"We identified 90,000 such polling stations which were vulnerable where we took preventive action against 373,000 people," he said.
He said the only complaint that the Commission received was that some names were not found in the electoral rolls.
"That may be due to several reasons. One, it may be computer error, or maybe some inefficiency".
