Mistakes galore in voter ID cards

When 39-year-old IT professional Amrit Dhanju got his voter ID card, he was in for a shock. His name was wrongly printed and the card mentioned him as living in a chawl. When he enquired about the cards of other members of the housing society, he realised all of them showed the same address.

The card of another voter mentioned the date of birth as 1993, making him a 20-year-old. He was not amused as he happens to be a senior citizen.

A total of 98 members of the housing society had applied for voter ID cards at Sadhana High School in Hadapsar last October. Last week they received only 69 cards and even they were full of mistakes.

"As many as 20 per cent of names on the cards is wrong. All have the same address of a chawl printed on them. Plus in 70 per cent of the cases, the addresses in Marathi and English do not match," said Amrit, a resident of Kumar Picasso Society in Hadapsar.

"A senior citizen's card mentions his date of birth as 1993. Almost 30 per cent of the cards had wrong dates of birth and many in place of date and month had 'XX' written in the space," added Amrit.

The lamination of cards is of very poor quality, said Amrit. "Almost 40 per cent of the cards reveals bad lamination. It's so poor that the printed paper containing information easily comes off and the hologram too, along with the lamination," said Amrit.

This is not the first time they have faced voter ID card problems. "The whole problem, I guess, is with the company to which this data entry work has been outsourced. They had messed it up last time during PMC elections. We had to fill the forms and go through the whole process all over again," added Amrit.

Twenty-nine of the society members have not received their voter ID cards.

Smriti Shukla, an IT professional, is one. "My mother-in-law, my husband and I, all had submitted the required documents. Everything was checked and verified by the authorities. But when the cards came, only my husband's voter card was received. There is no clue as to why our cards were not given," said Smriti.

"Already, the whole procedure of submitting documents is time-consuming. But doing it all over again due to their mistake is frustrating," said Smriti.

When asked about the matter, Apurva Wankhede, District Election Officer, said, "This mistake probably happened at the data entry level. But this is just one possibility. I will definitely inquire into it."

Wankhede said, "Whatever mistake has happened, we will take steps to rectify them as soon as possible with minimum inconvenience to people."

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