Simple, Pragmatic Suggestions to Election Commission

Dear Sir,

We sincerely Thank you for providing us, reasonably good elections so far. While a lot has been achieved but still lot more is required towards Electoral Reforms. We realize that Free and Fair elections are foundation for any Democracy. We also realize that its we the voters who should come forward and play our part, but unfortunately we are sometimes occupied with our jobs, household chores, meetings or even watching the entertaining head over heels Bollywood movies. While all of our consumeristic heeds are important to push us ahead of China, we realize that by not sparing time to vote, we are insanely leaving our houses open, hoping that the Ram Rajya will prevail. While we have many other explanations about why we hope for Euphoria to prevail and prepare ourselves to be embraced by the daemons from heaven, we have few simple suggestions which can make our and your life bit more easy and comfortable. We are not challenging your or capabilities, but we believe that these suggestions can be easily incorporated -

1. Please try to plan to elections over weekends and/ or over lapping with some public holidays. I know that certain officials might not be inclined to work during such odd times, but I think that this step can significantly increase the voter turnout across all categories such as working professionals, students or housewives. We, the people wont mind spending half of the off day to vote, but the probability of voting decreases significantly, if its organized on one of the hectic weekend.

2. Please try to increase the number of voting booths, so that its easy for you to monitor voting in each booth and it takes less time, thus will not hamper many of us from voting, who cant afford to spend hours in que under sun, due to various reasons.

3. Please make some special arrangements for physically handicap, elderly people, pregnant women at the polling booths.

4. As you might be aware that in 20 major cities of our country more than 100 million people, reside, i.e more than 10% of the total population. A significant percentage (guesstimate> 50%) of people are not bonafide of that particular city, hence cant vote. Similarly in several Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and towns (by population). Overall all these migrants (in metros, major cities and towns, including the NRIs) should total to more than 100 million India citizens, who cant vote. So please make simple and clear policies so as to include this group into election process.

5.  Instead of investing your time and resources in taming the Elephant, please try to tame the Liquor barons, the free food, drugs, cash distributors. You may disqualify candidates who found doing these un-democratic misdeeds and all his relatives from contesting in election for next 15 years. Please go on and ban that political party from contesting in the election of that specific constituency.

6. In addition to publishing all information on website, please create information kiosks in each village, town and city from where the citizens can gather information about the affidavits filed by each candidate, current and previous election manifesto of each political parties etc.

 7. Please the Government of India to allocate more funds to you, so that you can round the year propagate and educate the citizens about their rights and responsibilities.

8. Mobile Booths - Big trucks or vans can be converted into a Polling Booth which can travel to remote areas, Colleges, Hospitals, IT Parks etc where lot of potential voters reside but who are not able to visit Polling Booths due to insane traffic, heavy work schedule etc.

Implementing above suggestions wont cost too much of Exchequer's money, but will definitely improve the participation of we the people thus bolstering democracy in many subtle but powerful ways.

Of course the above list is not exhaustive, please add your suggestions in the comments and we can subsequently send an email/letter to Election Commission !