An inside view of polling procedures

What goes behind the entire exercise of holding an election in a country of 1.1 billion people, is amply shown in the documentary “Indian Elections—A mammoth democratic exercise” produced by the External Affairs Ministry.

The sheer numbers are mind-boggling—714 million voters, more than 828,000 polling stations, 1.37 million electronic voting machines and 5.5 million polling officials.

“But what goes beyond the numbers is the complexity of the entire process of holding the election by a body consisting of three commissioners and at most 300 staffers,” Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla said here after releasing the film on Tuesday evening.

“The exercise is surely of epic proportions and it is symbolic that we call the important Electoral Photo Identity Card as EPIC,” he said.

Directed by Laxmana Dalmia, the film not only gives a peek into the process of evolution of election in India since 1947, but also the nitty-gritties of the exercise like reviewing the electoral rolls and monitoring the pre-poll campaigns through observers.

“We feel responsible until the last voter is reached. We took almost one-and-half hour to find out how the election team could reach Zanskar in Ladakh where there are only 37 voters,” said Chawla.

Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon, who was also present on the occasion, said other countries could learn from the experience of world’s largest democracy.

Claiming that the EVMs used in India as the most cheap , user-friendly, Chawla said an EVM has been kept for display at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London.