Lok Sabha elections 2024 | Trivia: 35 years in the making, EC photo voter cards became a reality in 1993

Take a look at interesting tidbits of history associated with the Lok Sabha elections.

New Delhi: First floated in the late 1950s and shelved soon after, photo identity cards for voters became a reality only after a gestation period of 35 years when T N Seshan was the Chief Election Commissioner.

While voter cards with photos came into being in 1993, the idea was first floated soon after the second general elections in 1957 when the West Bengal government suggested the measure to "completely root out the evil" of bogus voters.

The Bengal government felt that if successfully implemented, no voter could be impersonated. It proposed that every voter in the constituencies in Kolkata and its suburbs should be given identity cards bearing their photographs.

The then-Chief Election Commissioner Sukumar Sen, who had by then the experience of conducting the first general elections of 1951-52, was enthusiastic about the idea. He initially decided to try it on an experimental basis in two Assembly constituencies in Kolkata to ascertain its practicability and cost.

The idea was to provide an ID card bearing the voter's photograph. One copy would be retained by the election office and used at the time of polling to verify voters' identities.

In 1961, the government made amendments to the Representation of the People Act, 1951 and relevant rules while the Election Commission chose the Calcutta South-West Lok Sabha seat, where a bypoll was due, for the exercise.

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Then Chief Election Commissioner K V K Sundram re-visited the idea of holding exercise in his report on the 1962 general elections, but noted that it had to be aborted because it would "not be practicable to operate the system satisfactorily" on a large scale either in Kolkata or elsewhere in the country.

Another consideration for burying the project was the estimation that the expenditure for Kolkata alone would be Rs 25 lakh, which would be "an appreciable addition to the national expenditure on the conduct of elections".

During the exercise in Calcutta South-West, only 2,13,600 out of a total of 3,42,000 voters could be effectively photographed, and identity cards with photographs attached could be issued only to 2,10,000 voters.

"Thus, three out of eight electors could not be provided with identity cards. The main reason for this was that an appreciable section of women electors refused to be photographed either by men or women photographers. A section of the voters could not be found at their places of residence from early morning till late at night," Sundaram noted.

The Commission also realised that the aim to “prevent impersonation in Calcutta City could have been achieved only by extending” photo ID cards to all the five parliamentary constituencies of Kolkata and Howrah, which then had an electorate of more than 20 lakh.

"After a careful consideration of the machinery available to the Commission for the purpose and after consulting the Government, the Commission came to the conclusion that it would not be practicable to operate the system satisfactorily on a large scale either in Calcutta or elsewhere in the country," he wrote in the report, published in 1965.

(Disclaimer: This is a revised version of an article published earlier in Deccan Herald)