Editorial: ECI’s E for efficiency

NEW DELHI: The Election Commission of India (ECI) is claiming it pulled off a 360-degree revision of Bisar’s electoral rolls in a matter of eight weeks. In a country known for bureaucratic sloth, this is nothing short of a miracle.

Consider the facts: Bihar has an electorate of 7.24 crore voters, with 1.7 crore migrant workers living outside the state. Nevertheless, according to the poll referee, 98.2% of the voters have participated in the special intensive revision, at the rate of 1.64% per day.

So there remains the small matter of 1.8% of the voting population submitting their papers in the next six days, and we’re good to go for the verification exercise. The ECI is all geared up for this. An army of officials—38 district election officers, 3,000 electoral registration officers, 90,712 block-level officers (BLOs), 1.6 lakh party representatives, and lakhs of volunteers — stand ready to complete the exercise by September 30.

What explains this fervour, which is so untypical of the Indian bureaucracy? The Opposition is on the warpath in Bihar with allegations that all this gearing up is only to soup up the election for the ruling party.

Such has been the partisanship of the election referee that it kicked off the game even before the players entered the field. With the polls still four months away, this speed of execution will go down in the annals of Indian bureaucracy as an exceptional example of official vigour.

Indeed, corners have been cut to achieve this frightful efficiency. Independent journalists have reported how BLOs are, instead of visiting households, filling the voters’ forms themselves, forging signatures when the name sounds “upper caste”, and affixing thumbprints when it suggests “lower caste”.

In keeping with this jugaad, who can object if the BJP’s fabled election machinery decides to spare voters the trouble of trudging to polling stations on election day and instead employs M/s Gurkeerat Singh Dang s/o dfojgaidf and Shakuni Devi, resident of H.No. 0 of Mahadevpura, to do the democratic honours? Certainly not the ECI?

The fascist degree of perfection achieved by the ECI army in Bihar is a startling contrast with the butter-fingered reputation enjoyed by the Indian bureaucracy. It is particularly delicious that such efficiency should be attained in the very state that took 84 years to build the Kosi Mahasetu.

Legend has it that floods destroyed the original bridge on the mercurial Kosi, the sorrow of Bihar, in 1934, and a new one was sanctioned in 2003. It was completed and inaugurated in 2020, only after the advent of N Modi.

The naysayers who sully the fair name of Indian babus will now have to eat their words, and the plethora of laxities recorded in the annals must be revised. Dare we carp anymore that the bureaucracy gives birth to itself and then expects maternity benefits? Surely, the narrative by NR Narayanamurthy that it used to take 24 months and 20 trips to Delhi to get a license to import computers is now history? Surely it’s a canard that it takes an average of 1,445 days to settle a commercial dispute in India, compared to 164 in Singapore? No, NITI Aayog got it wrong that projects worth Rs 18 lakh crore are stuck in procedural delays.

What does GST compliance require: 37 filings per year? Bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption account for a “governance tax” of 1–2% of GDP annually? No way. Just call in the ECI’s ghostbusters.