Guwahati: West Khasi Hills district in Meghalaya has an innovation ready to prevent booth or EVM capturing during the February 27 Assembly polls - an Ola or Uber-like tracking system.
The district administration has developed a GPS-based tracking app to be installed in the mobile phones of polling agents and returning officers before they head to their polling stations on February 26, a day before the polls, for real time tracking.
Of the 187 polling stations in three Assembly constituencies in the district - Nongstoin, Rambrai and Mawshynrut, 77 have been identified as vulnerable.
"Through this app, besides real time location, we will be able to calculate the exact distance from district headquarters Nongstoin to the polling stations. We will be able to ascertain the estimated time of arrival. After polling is complete we can also replay the route taken by the officers. This will help us in effective decision-making, response system and resource management. In case of a possible vehicle breakdown or personnel getting injured, EVM capturing like situations, the officer concerned has to press an SOS button and it will flash a red flag on the dashboard in the control room set up at the district headquarters," West Khasi hills deputy commissioner Arunkumar Kembhavi told The Telegraph.
A team from National Informatics Centre (NIC), Nongstoin, installed the application with the help of Hypertrack, a tracking software, similar to Uber. "This is the first such system being used to track polling personnel anywhere in the country. We are doing it as a pilot project. We have asked the returning officers to carry a smartphone and more than one SIM card as we have network problems in the hilly areas. So if one mobile company's network is poor, the other will help them stay on the network. Our pilot project may not be 100 per cent successful but this will be very useful in other parts of the country having better telephone network," Kembhavi said. A West Khasi Hills district team demonstrated the software use to a team of the Election Commission, which visited Meghalaya recently. "It has been shortlisted as one of the top 25 NIC innovations across India," he said.
