Election Commission's Response

Election Commission of India is a Constitutional body mandated to conduct elections for the Office of President of India, Vice President of India, Council of states, General elections to Lok Sabha and State Assemblies. In the course of due discharge of its duties, it needs to source manpower and logistics from various Central and State departments/agencies to ensure smooth conduct of Elections.  It may be recalled that for the Lok Sabha Elections 2019, elections were conducted across 10.36 lakh polling stations, spread across 543 constituencies, with more than 91 crore electors. ECI while maintaining a rather lean organizational set up in Delhi needs the services and assistance of various Ministries/ Departments of Union Government / Governments of various States and UTs.These services range from security arrangements; transportation of forces to reach respective places of deployment; polling staff on duty; provisioning of election material like Electronic Voting Machines, indelible ink or ensuring voter awareness through various platforms of media. Resources are requisitioned from various Union Government Ministries, including the Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Railways, and PSUs including ECIL, BEL to cite a few illustrative examples. As far as media related work is concerned, services of  media units, and Autonomous Bodies of Ministry of Information and Broadcasting like DAVP, NFDC are utilized. Manpower taken from their empanelled agencies functions under the supervision and control of ECI officers. A Social Media Communication Hub was established in the Commission in 2017. ECI approached M/s Broadcast Engineering Corporation India Ltd (BECIL), a Government of India enterprise under the Ministry of I&B,  to identify empanelled agencies to engage professionally qualified manpower to execute the work under supervision and control of ECI officers. Social media executives through M/s ADG Online Solutions Pvt. Ltd. were engaged based on their professional experience. ECI also approached National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), an organization under Ministry of I&B, in January 2019, to provide ECI with a suitable agency for the voter awareness campaign on social media, specifically with regard to Lok Sabha elections of 2019. Professionally experienced executives from M/s TSD Corporation Ltd  were engaged from March 19, 2019 till May 31, 2019. It is understood that all these reputed agencies have several verticals and rather varied and diverse list of clients who could range from other Government Ministries/Departments, PSUs, Private Sector and/or even political entities. There are inbuilt procedures for blacklisting etc. at various levels if any of the agencies is found to be subserving the interest of a political entity while working for ECI just as

any official howsoever highly placed can be taken to task if found to be acting in a partisan manner after an empirical and indepth inquiry. There have been many instances of removal of such officials overnight from the election related tasks. Normally, such action by ECI invariably also have a bearing on their dossiers for the rest of service lives. In any case the premise which seems to be inherent in these questions that anybody working in/for the Government would be partisan in favour of the ruling party or combination of the day. If this premise was to be accepted, there would not have been different political parties/ entities winning elections to the Lok Sabha and to the Assemblies of the States at different times. In fact, there have also been instances galore whereby the Lok Sabha election and Vidhan Sabha Elections which happened immediately thereafter or vice-versa have been the opposite of each other in terms of outcome. The role and maturity of the elector to whom the nomenclature of ‘Common Man’ is given rather condescendingly by most of the self-appointed elites is grossly underestimated. No complaints of any conflict of interest of work done by agency staff working in ECI have been received, during the process of Lok Sabha elections 2019 and/or thereafter.  

best wishes S B Sharan ADG PIB ECI