ERMS
Election Commission of India, in its directives to
the states has been continuously
directing each state to implement a comprehensive Electoral Roll Management
System (ERMS) to facilitate efficient handling of the Electoral roll with photos.
The Electoral Roll database used by the Chief Election Office(CEO)
to generate the Electoral Roll had been developed by a private party and maintained
in Ms-Acess. As per guidelines given by Election Commission
of India this data was to be maintained as per the table structure specified and
in ORACLE/MS SQL Server. Since the data was
not maintained as per guidelines specified by ECI it could not be used for consolidation
at national level. Moreover since the data was not maintained with all constraints,
generation of Electoral rolls became a time consuming and tedious effort with a
high percentage of errors. Being a disconnected
architecture data duplication and loss of information was a major concern.
In order to overcome the above problems Office of
Chief Election Officer roped in Goa Electronics Limited in March 2010 for the Development
of the ERMS Software for the State of
GEL took over the job of development of the Software in March’ 10 and was able to process the summary revision of 26-Aug-2010 through the ERMS software efficiently. The ERMS Software covered the complete process of generating a Electoral roll starting from the applications received in Form 6,7,8,8A to the generation of Supplementary Roll to the integration to the Mother Roll. The application is a consolidated system which manages the complete data related to Electoral Roll and also generates EPIC cards by storing Photo of concerned voter. Being a centralized system the complete database is maintained at a central location and as such problems such as duplication and loss of data are avoided totally. Moreover, the system has also enforced a three level authorization for acceptance any change to the Role. This has ensured active participation of the AERO(Assistant Electoral Registration Officer) and EROS(Electoral Registration Officer) in the system which has further reduced scope of any mistakes in the entry into the Role