Chief Electoral Officer of Telangana Vikas Raj has completed the onboarding of the officials at State and district levels for monitoring election expenditure incurred by the candidates and political parties for the forthcoming elections to the Telangana Legislative Assembly.
The Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) deployed a team of IT professionals, trained to work on the Election Seizure Management System (ESMS), the first of its kind application developed in-house by the Election Commission of India and deployed for elections to assemblies of five states. According to senior officials, more than 20 enforcement agencies have deployed their teams to monitor the election expenditure and report the movement of cash, liquor, precious metals and other freebies to allure the electors.
The objective behind the introduction of the ESMS is to enable digitisation of data of intercepted/seized items, from the field through the App. The system provides for the automation of reports in the required format and avoids duplicate entries by different agencies. “The analysis of the data is done by the CEO and necessary action will be initiated in a time bound manner,” a senior official told The Hindu.
Accordingly, the CEO’s office onboarded state-level nodal officers pertaining to all the enforcement agencies who subsequently constituted district level nodal officers for their respective agencies in a cascading manner with mapping of multiple districts. The district level bank coordinator too has been added to the network for generating receipts with QR code for all cash movements. The district election officers in turn will take on board the flying squads and static surveillance teams at the assembly constituency level.
“These teams can intercept/seize the cash if the quantity mismatches with the report,” the official said. The App has been designed in such a manner that the roles and responsibilities of the officials at various levels is clearly demarcated. For instance, the flying squads/static surveillance teams can edit records on the same day if no action has been initiated by the officials concerned. Any modification of the previous day’s records will not be allowed for any user and they should request the CEO if changes are to be made. It is mandatory for the CEO to incorporate his remarks in the event of accepting the request for modification of the recorded details.
