The democracy dividend for Indian electronics
17 April 2009
The global electronics manufacturing business, as we all know, is going through some very testing times. Each day brings further gloomy news. Even in India, the EMS companies have by and large reduced their operations and are certainly cutting back on capital expenditure and inventories of materials and operating supplies.
There have also been reports of laying off engineers and technicians, especially at production equipment manufacturing companies that had established design, software development and support centres in India.
Yet, outside of the still booming mobile telephony business, largely dominated by Nokia in handsets and Nokia – Siemens Networks in the infrastructure segment, there is one segment of Indian electronics manufacturing that has been merrily chugging along and has India’s great experiment as a free, secular democracy to thank.
The period from 17 April to 15 May will witness the world’s greatest democratic exercise as the Republic of India goes to the polls in its quadrennial exercise to elect 543 members to the lower house of Parliament which will then lead to the formation of the Federal Government. It is well known that India is the world’s largest democracy, but what is not fully comprehended is the scale of the whole exercise.
The polling process overseen by the autonomous Election Commission has a registered electorate of 714 million people, with a staggering 825,000 polling stations. The voting, spread over five phases and four weeks, for logistical and security reasons will involve five million election officials and 2.1 million security personnel. The fundamental right to vote in this great democracy of course means that the Election Commission is required to provide facilities for exercising ones franchise even if there is a solitary voter registered at a polling booth. Thus, as an example, there is polling Station No. 29, at Dharampur, in Arunachal State with only one registered voter or even more famously there is this priest who lives in a densely forested area famous for the sanctuary of the Gir Lions, who constitutes a single person polling station but requires a team of five election and security personnel to obtain his precious vote.
So what has all this to do with electronics, you may well ask? The answer incredibly is that India introduced Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) into its system as far back as 1982 and after quantum increases in their numbers annually, by 2004 every Federal, State and Provincial elections were utilising EVM. This is why Indians watched (and laughed) incredulously at the farcical drama of the dimpled and hanging chads of the Bush – Gore Presidential election face off.
Just to get an idea of the scale of things, the 2009 Federal poll exercise will use some 1.5 million EVM. Since the elections to state legislatures are usually held two years after those for the Centre, there is a steady ongoing demand for these electronic voting machines with all their paraphernalia. Unfortunately, due to reasons of security and to ensure absolutely foolproof exercising of electoral franchise, the manufacture of these machines is currently limited to two large public sector enterprises in the electronics sector. However, there is very steady business for equipment and materials vendors who have for years worked as reliable partners for these two public sector enterprises.
The EVM is a marvel of a simple, ingenious and completely indigenous custom design to suit the unique requirements of the Indian electoral process. It consists of two interconnected units, the Ballot Unit where the voter casts their vote by pressing a blue coloured button alongside the name of the candidate and the symbol of the party. The corresponding LED light is lit and a special loud beep sound is emitted if the vote has been correctly done. There is thus no scope for a misaligned election ballot form or a mismatch of names to the voting button. Furthermore, once a vote is cast, the Ballot Unit is automatically disabled until the next voter is enabled via the Control Unit, limiting the process to a single vote per person.
The Control Unit by which the polling official enables the Ballot Unit for the voter and where all related data like number of votes polled for each candidate, total votes cast reside. At the end of the polling process, the presiding official is required to press the close button on the Control Unit after which the machine will not accept any more votes, and there is no way any other official or person can restart the unit. Another button on the Control Unit enables the election officer to see the total number of votes cast. The Results button on the Control Unit is hidden and is physically secured by a protective seal. At the end of the voting process, the close button is pressed and the various Control Units are taken away under armed escort to be stored in Police protected vaults. On the day of counting the votes, the Control Units are taken out, the seal to the results button is broken in front of the candidates, and the button is pressed to give near-instantaneous results.
The electronics of the Indian EVM is simple but foolproof. The heart of the machine is a specially designed IC chip with unalterable, non retrievable, embedded assembly code software permanently fused. This makes the system much safer to use than any machines using C or C+ type software which may be manipulated. The chips are custom made by a Japanese manufacturer and are sealed at the time of import. Any attempt to rewrite the software will result in the chip being rendered non operational. The ICs themselves are hard wired and cannot be easily accessed or replaced.
Every EVM has a unique serial number which is also embedded into the system. This serial number is validated automatically before the commencement of operations. On detection of any mismatches, the machine is rendered unusable on suspicion of tampering.
All the voting data resides in Double Redundant EEPROM’s that do not need any external back up batteries for retention. Given the non availability or only intermittent availability of electrical power in many polling stations, the EVM is designed to run on locally manufactured, highly reliable, 6 volt alkaline batteries. As a result, this light weight, portable, very low MTBF machine can be carried to the remotest corners of this vast country on the backs of elephants, camels, horses and yaks.
So you see there is indeed a democracy dividend for Indian Electronics much to the chagrin of those envious ones who are not willing to either adopt technology for the good of their people or more importantly indeed the advantages and values of a free, secular democratic society.
Contact Details and Archive...
Most Viewed Articles...