Mohinder Verma
JAMMU, Nov 29: Apart from many other aspects, the alphabet ‘Q’ has greater significance for the Election Commission of India (ECI) during the ongoing Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir. The Commission is banking upon this alphabet to ensure hassle free voting by the electorates and yield encouraging results in terms of high voter turnout.
The necessity of making use of this alphabet-based system for the first time in Jammu and Kashmir was felt by the Election Commission keeping in view various factors associated with the voting percentage in the urban areas. This system would be used in eight districts of the State —Jammu, Samba, Kathua, Udhampur, Rajouri, Poonch, Srinagar and Anantnag on the day of polling.
Official sources told EXCELSIOR that much before the announcement of elections in Jammu and Kashmir, the Commission was considering ways and means to ensure maximum turnout of voters from the urban areas as the past record about participation of such voters in the polls was not encouraging.
After analyzing the available data about percentage of voting in the urban areas in the previous elections, the Commission found it appropriate to roll out, for the first time, ‘Q’ based system in at least eight districts of the State as this system has already done wonders in some States of the country particularly during the Lok Sabha elections.
This system is called—‘Q’ (queue) Information System and is a tool for the voters to know about rush at the polling booth on poll day. This Short Messaging Service (SMS) based system would be launched in respect of 50 polling stations in urban areas of Jammu district, 18 polling stations in Samba district and 115 in Kathua district besides in number of polling stations of Udhampur, Rajouri, Poonch, Srinagar and Anantnag.
Under this system, help desk would be established in all the selected polling stations where concerned Booth Level Officer would record the number of electorates entering and departing the polling station after short intervals. The BLO would report about the number of persons standing in queue at any given time at the polling booth and send this information by SMS several times during poll hours.
In response to a question, sources said that the Election Commission of India has got large number of Booth Level Officers (BLOs) trained to update the queue length on the National Informatics Centre server after every 15 minutes. The BLOs would also send SMS to their respective District Election Officers for supervising election process through SMS-based alert system.
Any voter, who wants to get information about the number of persons standing in the queue in a particular polling station, would have to send SMS for querying current position of queue. On receiving this query SMS from the voter, the system would send detailed information to the voter through SMS.
Stating that the facility would help urban voters in saving their time besides avoiding the hassle of standing in queue, sources said that voters will have to send SMS containing Voter I Card Number to the Mobile Number 7738299899 and they will be given details of the polling station along with a message.
For the voters, the SMS Syntax is—- JNKERM<space> Q<space>ACNO,PSNO. ACNO indicates the Assembly Constituency Number and PSNO indicates the Polling Station Number. For example: JNKERM Q 71,25 will give the number of persons in queue in polling station number 25 of AC 71-Gandhi Nagar.
For reply to SMS by voter from server, the SMS Syntax is AC-ACNO<space>PS-PSNO<space>No. of voters in Q<NNN>on<date> <space><time>. ACNO indicates the Assembly Constituency Number and PSNO indicates the Polling Station Number. NNN is the number of voters in queue.
By making use of ‘Q’ based information system, the voters would be able to spare time as per the queue status and cast their votes without any hassle or wasting time.
According to the sources, normal SMS rates would apply for sending any message to the system by the voters.
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