Braille ballot paper printing at Devnar

Hyderabad: There is a different kind of buzz at the Devnar School for the Blind. Work is going on at a brisk pace to make dummy Braille ballot paper. A 36-page dummy Braille ballot paper which will have 185 candidates contesting for the Nizamabad parliament seat is being made.

The Devnar School of Blind is the first one to modify the electronic voting mission to help the visually-impaired voters to vote independently to a candidate of their choice without being dependent on anyone. Since the pilot process stared in 2004, till today throughout the country, all Assembly and Parliamentary elections are conducted with the help of dummy ballot papers and modified EVM's.

Earlier, when there were only 15 or 20 candidates contesting the elections, the Braille ballot paper was limited to two to three pages. But this year the Foundation is facing an extraordinary situation which they have never come across as the number of candidates has increased up to 185 from a single constituency.

A Saibaba Goud, Founder of Devnar Foundation, said, "The dummy ballot paper will consist of a serial number, name of the candidate and party name when the visually-impaired voter goes to the polling booth this dummy ballot paper is given to them who then will go through the paper and all the details.

Accordingly, he will decide which candidate has to be voted by him independently when he goes inside the booth the EVM will contain Braille language stickers pasted on them with candidates details mentioned which will help the voter to decide and select the candidate of his choice.

Each EVM has the capacity to accommodate 16 names of the candidates. So, if a constituency is having more than 16 candidates more than one EVM machines would be used and placed beside each other in orderly format."

For Telangana 2019 Lok Sabha elections, 74,000 ballot papers are printed for the 16 Parliament constituencies and for Nizamabad they have printed 67,000 ballot papers. The names are printed in Telugu, English, and Urdu.

They have their own staff of 10 people in addition of the workload they have hired 6 more people who are working day and night since they have to hand over the papers and stickers to the State election authority by April 8. Along with Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, the foundation is printing ballot papers for New Delhi, Mizoram, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka.