SHILLONG: Chief Electoral Officers of all the eight Northeast states will meet in Shillong on April 29 to discuss the implementation of the National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme (NERPAP) to bring out a complete error-free and authenticated electoral roll throughout the country.
Meghalaya Chief Electoral Officer P. Naik said on Sunday that Deputy Election Commissioner of India Vinod Zutshi will chair the meeting.
The purpose of the meeting convened by the Election Commission of India is to match the electoral rolls with bio metric records to remove dubious or duplicate voters.
In case of Meghalaya, the task to authenticate bio metric cards is undertaken by the Registrar General of Census.
The new initiative of NERPAP is aimed at proper authentication of the voters as Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) data of electors will be linked with Aadhaar data.
NERPAP also aims at improving the image quality of electors by way of corrections of errors as matching with Aadhaar will ensure accuracy of electoral rolls.
As per NERPAP, the facility to link Aadhaar number will be provided to electors through SMSes, e-mails, mobile applications and National Voters Service Portal using web services through ECI website.
NERPAP also suggests that electors also can link their Aadhaar number by making a call at 1950 to states’ call centres.
NERPAP also highlights that collection and feeding of Aadhaar will be done by Electoral Registration Officer. For this, special camps will be organized, besides setting up of voter facilitation centres, e-Seva centres and citizen service centres. Moreover, Booth Level Officers will also conduct door-to-door surveys to collect the details.
Meghalaya with just 0.7 per cent (total 21,313 persons) is at the bottom in terms of availing Aadhaar cards as per the official data released till March 8 this year.
While in Assam, the percentage is 0.08 (242,655), the data shows that Arunachal has 12.2 % (168,460 persons), Mizoram 26.2 % (286,146), Manipur 41.2 % (1,120,649), Nagaland 43.2 % (856,374), Sikkim 92.4 % (562,562) and Tripura 90.2 % (3,317,808).
