Nearly one-and-half years after being launched jointly by the Election Commiss-ion of India (ECI) and city-based Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship at the Shantinagar constituency, the Proper Urban Electoral (PURE) Rolls project is now giving rich dividends. According to data, after the second verification which was completed in February, it was recommended to delete the names of 47,126 voters from the present Electoral Role (ER) and to shift 9,964 names.
As a part of this initiative, 20,654 voter’s ID cards were also distributed in the seven wards of the constituency and over 25,000 names were added to the electoral rolls.The PURE Roll pilot project was launched on July 23, 2010 and following its huge success, has been extended till September 4, 2014. According to Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship officials, they had deployed a 20-member team and mobilised and trained over 400 local Area Voter Mitras (AVMs) to help the ECI in addressing two key issues i.e. verifying the accuracy of the electoral rolls and to ensure that new names that needed to be included were added to the rolls.
“At the end of this 15 month-long exercise, over 40,000 names have been identified for deletion while over 25,000 names were added to the electoral rolls,” said a senior officer.
Mass revision drive
Meanwhile ECI will hold a mega election roll revision drive in the city in association with various civic agencies and NGOs from April 16. Addressing a press conference on the maintenance of proper urban electoral rolls, Election Commissioner Mr V.S. Sampath said that as part of the drive, officials will visit every house in the city and verify electoral rolls. “This drive will be continued till May 8,” he said.
“The Commission has decided to use the photos provided by the residents for voter ID cards to avoid long queues. We will also allow residents to change their photos in existing Photo ID cards. To help people working in the private sector, we will also keep our offices open on Sundays,” he said, adding, “Revised roll will be released on June 15.”