EVM’s fate up in the air after waste of public money
The fate of the Electronic Voting Machines hangs in the balance as the related project ends in June, with no sign of the Election Commission initiating any new project or plan for the maintenance and storage of the existing machines so far.
The project to purchase 1.5 lakh EVMs was taken up in July 2018, ahead of the national polls in December that year, to reduce the use of paper ballots.
The machines, each with a lifespan of 10 years, were bought at a cost of about Tk 3,825 crore.
Six years down the line, this huge amount of public money is set to go down the drain due to "faulty project planning and a lack of adequate maintenance and provision of preservation" of the EVMs.
EC officials said that around 1.05 lakh EVMs, which cost Tk 2.35 lakh each – more than 11 times the price of the machines used in India, are "out of order and no longer useable" in elections.
In the process, Tk 2,467 crore of public money has already been lost.
The money wasted over the EVMs is almost three times the total budget for the 2018 national elections, which was Tk 700 crore.
Election Commissioner Md Alamgir in a recent meeting of commissioners proposed forming a technical committee to identify the EVMs that are out of order and "destroy them", EC documents show.
Contacted, he told this newspaper that he meant that the out of order EVMs should be "disposed of" in line with the government policy of disposing unusable assets.
WASTE OF PUBLIC MONEY
Brig Gen (retd) M Sakhawat Hussain, a former election commissioner, said, "This [purchase of EVMs] is a waste of public money, and it happened as there was no proper storage system to preserve these expensive and sophisticated machines."
He said the EC, whether the current one or the previous one, should be held accountable for this.
"Have the manufacturers given any instructions for preservation of EVMs?" he asked, adding, "It is really unfortunate that none is being held accountable for the wastage of public money."
Asked about the money squandered in the EVM project, Alamgir said, "We're seeking financial support so that we can preserve the machines and save the public money."
He added that they had planned a project to buy new EVMs that also had provisions of building warehouses to preserve and maintain existing and new EVMs.
"But the project was sent back by the authorities concerned."
In August 2022, it was decided that EVMs would be used in 150 constituencies in the January 2024 polls.
EC officials, however, had said they only had enough machines to cover 70-80 constituencies and would need to purchase more to meet the target of 150.
But in January 2023, the government rejected an EC project, worth Tk 8,711 crore, which was to purchase 2 lakh new EVMs and construct 10 facilities to store them.
In mid-February that year, Bangladesh Machine Tools Factory (BMTF), the lone manufacturer of the EVMs used by the EC, in a proposal said 40,000 of the machines purchased were beyond repair and the remaining 1.1 lakh can be fixed at a cost of around Tk 1,260 crore, said a top EC secretariat official.
The Planning Commission rejected the proposal, citing "the government's financial capacity" in the current global context and so, the government in April refused to give the money required to repair the 1.1 lakh machines.
Currently, 1.05 lakh machines remain out of order.
EVM Project Director Col Syed Raquibul Hasan, blamed the lack of proper maintenance and proper storage facilities for so many EVMs becoming non-functional.
He, however, reiterated that many of them are repairable.
"In many cases, monitors and timers were broken, cables got lost, and fingerprint-matching components and ballot unit buttons were damaged."
WHO TO BLAME
EC Md Alamgir said that, in his observation, the project taken by the previous commission was faulty as it did not have provisions for preservation, maintenance and trained manpower to handle the sophisticated machines.
"They [the previous Election Commission] used the machines in only six seats in the 2018 national election. They could have piloted and bought the machines in phases instead of procuring 1.5 lakh machines at one go."
In March 2023, the EC issued a tender to rent houses in 64 districts to store the machines, but they found such houses in only 38.
EC officials said they could not rent houses in many of the districts as the owners do not want to rent their homes out to government organisations because they cannot increase rent price frequently.
Meanwhile, many structures, including warehouses, schools and colleges, rented to store EVM's lacked the proper environment to do so.
Former election commissioners Rafiqul Islam and Brig Gen (retd) Shahadat Hossain Chowdhury said they proposed vertical expansion of the EC office at the field level and the renting warehouses with proper environment in areas with no EC office, but their proposal went unheeded.
FUTURE UNCERTAIN
Multiple EC sources said the future of EVM is uncertain as the commission has no plans to chalk out new projects and has not taken any initiative to extend the current one.
Without an extension or a new project, the EC will also struggle to meet the expenses of the rented warehouses at BMTF and other places across the country.
EC officials said that around 1.03 lakh EVMs are now at the BMTF warehouse, and it demanded Tk 97 lakh per month, but the matter is yet to be settled.
On the other hand, there are 46,000 EVMs at other rented houses, educational institutions, and other places, while 1,000 are at the EC office in Agargaon.
EC sources said they spend around Tk 35 lakh per month to keep the machines at 41 districts.
EC Additional Secretary Ashok Kumar Debnath said the commission has taken the decision to write a letter to the government, seeking its advice on the future usage of the machines.
About whether the project will get an extension or a new project will be taken, EVM Project Director Raquibul said he was yet to get any such information from the commission.