Photo ID cards for voters made their debut over three decades after they were first mooted in 1957

New Delhi, Mar 17 (PTI) Over 97 crore voters are registered in the electoral rolls for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls and will cast their franchise using their photo ID card. But the unique cards in the Indian electoral system are not as old as the first elections.

What the Election Commission once thought was “not practicable to operate satisfactorily on a large scale”, has become a mainstay in India’s election system. The identity cards are now acceptable also as proof of identity and address.

First mooted in 1957 to rule out the malpractice of bogus voters, the Electors Photo Identity Cards (EPICs) debuted over three decades later in 1994 when they were launched to prevent impersonation at polling stations.

A pilot project of the photo identity card for the voters was undertaken in Calcutta (South West) parliamentary constituency for the by-election in May 1960 did not succeed.

Thereafter, the project was shelved for almost two decades. Photo identity cards were issued for the October 1979 assembly elections in Sikkim. The idea was subsequently implemented in other northeastern states like Assam, Meghalaya and Nagaland. This was a precursor to nationwide launch of Electors Photo Identity Cards in 1994.

According to Election Commission’s report on 1962 Lok Sabha polls, soon after the general elections of 1957, it was suggested to the Election Commission that the issue of identity cards, with photographs attached, to all electors in congested urban areas would greatly facilitate identification at the time of poll and avoid impersonation.

“The Election Commission tried it as an experimental measure in the Calcutta South-West parliamentary constituency in which a by-election was then due. In spite of strenuous efforts spread over a period of ten months, only 2.13 lakh electors out of a total of 3.42 lakh could be effectively photographed, and identity cards with photographs attached could thereafter be issued only to 2.10 lakh.

“Thus, three out of eight electors could not be provided with identity cards. The main reason for this was that an appreciable section of women electors refused to be photographed either by men or women photographers. A section of the voters could not be found,” the report noted.

Then Chief Election Commissioner K V K Sundaram recalled the exercise in his report on the 1962 General Elections that had to be aborted after finding out that it would “not be practicable to operate the system satisfactorily” on a large scale either in Kolkata or elsewhere in the country.

“The expenditure on the project for the Calcutta area alone would be of the order of Rs 25 lakh which would be an appreciable addition to the national expenditure on the conduct of elections.

“After a careful consideration of the machinery available to the commission for the purpose and after consulting the government, the EC came to the conclusion that it would not be practicable to operate the system satisfactorily on a large scale either in Calcutta or elsewhere in the country,” he said.

According to the book “Leap of Faith” published by the Election Commission to document the journey of elections in India, the nationwide programme for EPIC was launched in 1994.

“This was followed by an intensive revision of electoral rolls in 1995. The challenge was to integrate the EPIC with electoral rolls. In 1997, the work of computerising the electoral roll was taken up. In addition to this high volume of data for 62 crore plus voters the commission had to meet the challenge of handling data in multiple languages,” it read.

“The electoral roll was now to be treated as a database rather than a simple printed text as before. The format of the electoral roll was thoroughly standarised. The EPIC and computersied electoral roll were integrated. This made it possible for a voter to migrate from one constituency to another while retaining the same EPIC,” it added.

The Election Commission had in 2021 launched the e-EPIC (Electronic Electoral Photo Identity Card).

e-EPIC is a non-editable secure portable document format (PDF) version of the EPIC and will have a secured QR code with image and demographics like serial number, part number, etc. e-EPIC can be downloaded on a mobile or a computer and can be digitally stored.

India is gearing up for the next general elections to elect its 18th Lok Sabha. Polling for the 543 Lok Sabha seats will be held in seven phases, starting with 102 in the first phase on April 19. The votes will be counted on June 4.

Nearly 97 crore registered voters across 543 constituencies will cast their ballot at 10.5 lakh polling stations.

Around 1.5 crore polling and security personnel, about 55 lakh EVMs and four lakh vehicles will be deployed for the polls, according to the poll authority.