So Lok Sabha elections are going on in India. You have definitely read a lot about these elections in the previous editions of this newspaper. Now one is that these elections are being organised in seven phases. Yeah, you read about it!
By now, that is the time that this paper got published late on Saturday night, three phases had been completed. The fourth phase happens on 29 April.
You must be wondering, ‘Such a huge election! Why do we need to spread it out so much? Why do we need to go on and on and on with it?
Well, that’s because India is a huge country with more than a billion people living here. Of these, a few million people are above 18 years of age, that means, all these people can vote. So it needs a huge system to make so many people vote.
There have to be security personnel, there have to be so many functional voting machines, there have to be a lot of administration officials who will be assigned different jobs throuhg the election process beginning with finding out the number of people of voting age, to making and distributing voter slips to each of them etc till the results are out.
Besides, there is also the thing of ‘disturbance’ or violence at polling centres when the voting process is on. This is quite typical to India. But it is a real problem in India.
India does not have enough security and administration officials and India is not equipped with enough resources like voting machines polling booths etc to match the number of voters. So voting in phases helps. Some states or cities vote on one day. Then there is a break. Then another bunch of states/cities go to vote.
This way, the burden on the government is reduced and elections can be conducted without any problems.
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