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TCS's digital system enabled over 13 crore voter deletions
The Wire··5d ago
The Election Commission told RTI activist Anjali Bharadwaj it had no minutes of any meeting that decided the Special Intensive Revision of voters. An algorithm called 'logical discrepancy' eliminated voters for 11 reasons, deleting more than 13 crore names from India's electoral rolls. Tata Consultancy Services built the ERONet platform and its successor, ECINet, which run India's electoral rolls.
Prism
What It Means For You
- New voters registering during the Special Intensive Revision must prove under the altered Form 6 that a grandfather was listed on the rolls decades earlier.
- More than 13 crore people have already had their names deleted from India's electoral rolls under the algorithm's 11 listed reasons.
- No public minutes exist showing who decided to conduct the revision, so affected voters have no official record explaining why the process began.
What's Happening
- Tata Consultancy Services built ERONet and its successor platform ECINet, the digital systems that run the Special Intensive Revision, rather than any government agency building them in-house.
- An algorithmic tool called 'logical discrepancy' eliminates voters for 11 different reasons, and more than 13 crore names have been deleted from the rolls so far.
- The Election Commission told RTI activist Anjali Bharadwaj it has no minutes of any meeting that decided to conduct the revision.
Who Built The Digital System
- India's electoral rolls were historically managed by Electoral Registration Officers, usually local sub-divisional magistrates, who prepared and verified rolls constituency by constituency.
- That decentralised structure was designed so no single office at the Election Commission's Delhi headquarters could control the national voter list.
- TCS's parent group became the single largest identifiable funder of the party running the government in the same years that TCS built the revision's digital systems.
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