ECIL’s Technology At The Forefront Of GHMC Elections
30 January, Hyderabad
Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), devised and designed by Hyderabad-based Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL), a Public Sector Undertaking of Department of Atomic Energy, will play a major role in ensuring free and fair elections.
The EVM has successfully replaced the conventional ballot paper for voting and has revolutionized the electoral process in the country. These EVMs, which are successfully utilized in General Elections for Parliament as well as state legislature assemblies are now being used in the elections to Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), to be held on February 2.
Situated in a 45 acre area in Cherlapalli locality of Hyderabad and spread over a built up area of 4000 square meters, a facility was set up by ECIL to manufacture and supply Electronics Voting Machines.
This facility today has fully automated production lines and comparable to the best manufacturing units in the world.
EVM is a microprocessor based instrument incorporating a microchip that has fused firmware. It has certain excellent features. The features include simple to operate, tamper proof programme which controls the functioning of the machine is burnt into a micro chip on a one time programmable basis, and once burnt it cannot be read, copied out or altered, eliminates the possibility of invalid votes, makes the counting process faster and the results can be declared within a few hours, rduces the cost of printing, does not depend on electricity as it operates on batteries and Braille markings on the machine for visually challenged In the GHMC elections to be held on February 2, a titak of 9370 EVMs of ECIL make will be put in use, including reserves, in the 7790 polling stations.
ECIL has already completed the job of carrying out the First Level Check of all these EVMs. It has also been entrusted with the responsibility of support for sealing, commissioning, polling and counting.
ECIL has deployed sufficient number of people, including one Apex Level co-ordinator, one senior official for each of the five circles, one experienced officer for each of the 24 Zones and two well trained engineers for each of the 150 wards of GHMC to support EVMs during the elections.