Column: Soul-Ution
By Sanjay Sharma
Enough of pandemic-stirred despondency – death, sickness, sliding economy and job losses. Not an easy task to leave behind that which affects decades ahead.
While apparent lessons learnt are investment in healthcare and a global alliance against signs of disease spread and accompanied economic misery, the renaissance after the 1347 pandemic encourages the world to look ahead. The pandemic killed between 75 million to 200 million in Europe and Africa.
It was post-1347 pandemic after which science started getting attention over the Church. The same awful event led to ideals of French Revolution in society, politics, art and philosophy coming to the forefront to unleash development of science and unprecedented growth.
The Covid-19 pandemic struck the world in an age where physical communication came to a standstill. Digital and telecom replaced traditional communication, coming as a relief to the environment.
Let us build upon what is the strongest – the digital communication.
What about digital elections forcing a widespread change of the renaissance scale?
And, if Indian elections which are perpetual – parliament, assemblies and local bodies and the most expensive in the world – can see a transformation, a new way may open up.
Let us examine what could be done in the state assembly elections in the largest state Uttar Pradesh, the hill states of Uttarakhand, Himachal, Jammu Kashmir, Manipur and the rich north western state of Punjab next year. The coastal state of Goa is also due for elections next year.
These states are a mix of rich and not-so-rich and are almost a fifth of India’s 1.4 billion population.
The fear of Covid spread during elections will still lurk as vaccination is not likely to be completed soon. New variants bypassing vaccines are also posing a challenge. Elections in India are a huge social event with millions of people and party workers visiting voters, holding rallies and even small gatherings in tens of thousands of events.
Why not turn the situation into a blessing in disguise. A true internet age now has to reach villages. Internet-based voting and campaigning has to be tried.
A recent report in The Times of India revealed that rural users of internet had by November 2019 crossed 227 million compared to the urban users at 205 million.
Out of 5,97,618 villages, 5,58,537 villages already have 4G or 3G internet reach, according to the official record of the government of India.
The government already had a scheme to link all villages to panchayat. If only the village connection mission is advanced, a new revolution will usher in India – elections through net. If remaining villages are also connected, we can even think of a parliamentary election in 2024 through e-voting.
The amount of effort and expenditure on the new experiment of a permanent nature will offset future expenditure on taking net to each village.
It is a good bargain as the network prepared for the election will boost e-commerce in rural areas, e-governance, tele or e-healthcare and e-education. Migration from villages to urban areas may slow down as daily and routine migration for availing these facilities in urban areas will not be required as much as now.
Environment will be a big gainer as transportation of millions of people daily will not be required. Vehicular pollution in India is one of the biggest contributors to environmental degradation.
Cost of urban properties will likely come down as there will not be a pressure on urban infrastructure for the people to settle for education purpose.
Improvement in quality of administration will be another plus as e-voting will allow migrants, both within India and abroad, to cast their vote sitting at their places of work. Migrants are known to exert a lot of pressure on quality of local administration as they have seen a better administration abroad and even in the urban areas of India.
Now let us discuss the most difficult area to reform – politics. Voting through internet, phone and computers will bring down the cost of logistics. Such a situation will also discourage political rallies drawing thousands of people.
Political campaigns will turn to internet and telecommunication. One of the problems of campaigning in a divided India is candidates are free to speak anything, without fear of repercussions. They sometimes speak patent lies, half-truths and use caste and communal feelings to divide the society to polarize voters.
Internet-based campaign will start recording communication of candidates and can be used as an evidence against them in an election petition.
E-campaigning will also reduce the requirement of physically visiting each family. Personal visits generally lead to a corrupt practice of the visitor and the voter striking a personal deal. Japan had a rule that no voter could be visited personally to curb such a tendency.
India also needs to amend the law to bar personal exchange between the voter and the candidate during the election.
Voting infrastructure in the future will also allow democracy to deepen as the same structure could be used for frequent referendum on crucial issues. Civil society will grow to prepare the people on the issues related to the referenda.
The question is if we want to bring back a reform-driven sentiment tried centuries back to bring hope in the lives of people who survive the pandemic.
