The urban voter, not on a roll….Ramesh Ramanathan , Swati Ramanathan , T S Krishnamurthy , N R Narayana Murthy
An electoral system designed for a predominantly rural country cannot cope with its urban revolution
Imagine a village with a few thousand residents, half of whom are above the voting age of 18. On an annual basis, the list of voters in this village barely changes a few women get married and move out, a few older residents pass away, but these numbers are insignificant. There are few instances of anyone new moving into the village. Once a year, the local tahsildar, supported by village accountants and school teachers, ensures that the electoral rolls are kept updated. Despite the fact that the local officials have other obligations, the minimal burden of this additional work makes it manageable. This remarkable backbone of our electoral apparatus, run by the Election Commission of India (EC), has withstood the test of numerous elections. It is also the narrative of an India that has been predominantly rural for over six decades.
Now consider Bangalore. Between 2001 and 2011, the city added over 30 lakh residents, swelling its population by 47 per cent to reach almost a crore. It is important to note that the census figure measures a net increase of population over a 10-year window: the lakhs of people moving into the city minus the lakhs moving out. From a voter list standpoint however, these ebbs and flows are crucial to capture, because voters need to exercise their franchise in their place of ordinary residence at a particular point in time.
Janaagrahas work in Bangalore over the years shows that, over any 12-month period, about 10 per cent of eligible voters move out of their homes, and a similar number move into that same neighbourhood. With over 65 lakh voters in the city, this means that there will be close to 15 lakh forms that need to be processed for Bangalore, and this number is growing every year.
Currently, the system to manage the electoral rolls in Bangalore is exactly the same as it is for the relatively static village. There are Electoral Returning Officers (EROs), who are revenue officials of the local city corporation, with other governmental responsibilities. As in the village, these EROs are supported by school teachers. The share of government schools being very low in the city, private school teachers are also asked to step in, but they have no incentive to cooperate, and cannot be ordered to do so.
In January 2008, N. Gopalaswami, then Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), said, It seems that nobody dies in Bangalore. He had just completed a review of the electoral rolls in the state. There were an astonishing number of errors, leading the EC to declare that they would be deleting and adding lakhs of entries over the next few weeks, in what looked more like a disaster-relief operation than a maintenance job on a database: 30,000 government servants, 12 senior level officers at the state level, and four observers from other states. After a few months, the operation was declared a success.
Four years later in 2012, the problem resurfaced. In January, Bangaloreans saw 14 lakh names struck off the electoral rolls in one fell swoop, as a result of the EC putting tremendous pressure on the state and city administration to improve the accuracy of the voter list.
Bangalore may be the most visible sign of the stress being caused in managing urban electoral rolls, but it is not alone. India is already past the tipping point of urbanisation, with close to 400 million residents spread across 8,000 urban settlements. According to Census 2011, we added almost 3,000 new urban settlements in the past 10 years, and for the first time, urban population growth exceeded its rural counterpart. As we see the structural shifts in becoming an urban nation, we should be prepared for high urban voter flows, both into and within our cities and towns.
This is not about bureaucratic neglect or administrative incompetence, but rather the early warning signs of a new order: a dynamic, mobile urban citizenry. An electoral system that was designed for a different demographic is getting overwhelmed by Indias urban revolution. Without an improved system whose operational processes are geared for robust continuous updation, using a combination of technology and local citizen participation, we will constantly need disaster-relief operations that struggle to keep the system patched up.
Over the next 20 years, urbanisation will shape every aspect of our society. Both our formal as well as informal economy will be fuelled by urbanisation. Our environmental challenges will be compounded by urban issues of water and waste management, urban transportation and pollution. We will need to make more complex choices related to state-market interfaces like public-private partnerships for infrastructure creation.
These challenges can only be addressed and shaped through political processes, which will increasingly be the politics of urban India. And it is here that we will be confronted by the growing crisis of an overwhelmed urban voter roll system, which is the spine of any democratic process. Poor urban voter rolls will suppress voter participation, distort political outcomes and undermine the core argument of representative democracy that we get the representatives we deserve.
The EC is a credible authority, and should be complimented for not only being a vigorous custodian of its constitutional mandate, but also displaying the desire and capacity for innovation and partnership. The EC has consistently engaged with advocates who bring new ideas and solutions to pressing problems in our electoral system. On the urban electoral roll front as well, the EC has done the same: over the past two years, the EC has been working on a pilot project in Bangalore to improve urban electoral roll management with Janaagraha. This work, championed by five CECs over the past eight years, including the incumbent, has resulted in the development of a manual for Proper Urban Electoral (PURE) rolls. The PURE rolls manual addresses various process issues related to urban voter roll management, and is now ready to be implemented in a set of pilot constituencies before getting scaled up across urban centres in the country. Eventually, the EC will need to have permanent urban electoral offices with exclusive, dedicated staff to handle the volume of urban updation.
This work needs to be supported. As we move forward in the coming months to the next wave of elections leading up to the parliamentary elections of 2014, all stakeholders from party leaders to policy experts to the media should resist the temptation to facetiously explain low urban turnout as the reflection of an apathetic urban electorate, but rather recognise the more accurate diagnosis of an overwhelmed electoral system. After all, over 300 million urban votes are at stake, and this number is only growing.
Murthy is chairman emeritus, Infosys. Krishnamurthy is a former chief election commissioner. Swati and Ramesh Ramanathan are co-founders of Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, Bangalore