10 million NRIs may soon get to vote, but what about 100 million domestic migrants?

The Supreme Court (SC) has nudged the Union government to plug a major gap that has, thus far, prevented over 10 million Indians from voting in elections. Over two years after the government agreed in principle to give voting rights to NRIs, arrangements to actually enable them to vote are yet to be made. This inaction has forced the SC to direct the government on 14 July to make a decision regarding this, and accordingly create a road map for future action within a week.

A bench of Chief Justice J S Khehar and Justice D Y Chandrachud asked the government whether it wants to amend Sections 20 and 20A of the Representation of People's Act, or if it feels merely amending the Rules of the Act will suffice. The bench also noted that the Election Commission (EC) had set up a committee regarding this in 2013, which had submitted its report to the government the following year.

Despite the government agreeing to the report's recommendations in 2015, there has been no movement on this front since. Given the fact that the government has been sitting on the move for two years, one cannot be sure whether the SC directive will actually result in any urgency now.

However, the case demonstrates the resonance of the issue of voting rights for NRIs among two constitutional guardians of the electoral process - the EC and the SC. And while movement on this front should be welcomed, one is left wondering why no one seems to care about an equally, if not more, pressing problem at hand – the non-participation in polls of those resident Indians who want to vote but are unable to.

The problem

Over 28 crore (280 million) Indians eligible to vote in 2014, did not exercise their key democratic right in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. This, in spite of the fact that these polls saw the highest ever voter turnout (66.4%) in the history of national elections in India. While it is conveniently assumed that the non-voters are those who simply have no interest in the electoral process, the truth could be quite different.

A large number of people who do not vote in elections in India are not those who do not want to, but those who simply cannot. Take the case of Indroneel, for example, who came to Delhi in 2002, leaving behind his family in a small village in West Bengal's Malda district. He has spent 15 years in the national capital, and has not been able to vote even once in this period, neither in Delhi nor in Malda.

Indroneel is not alone. Regional inequalities have forced millions of Indians to move away from their place of origin in search of education and livelihood. These domestic migrants are largely out of the electoral process because they are registered as voters in their home city/town/village and the EC has no provisions to enable them to vote from wherever they are.

Going back home is costly because it involves, apart from money to travel, leave from work and various other arrangements. This makes the process extremely difficult, causing most people to simply give up on exercising their voting rights. This is what NRIs have been complaining of, and the EC is treating their case with due sympathy. However, this problems hold true for domestic migrants as well, even if the costs are lower as compared to those incurred by NRIs.

The alternative, many suggest, is to get oneself registered as a voter wherever one stays, but that has its own perils. It is difficult to manage a proof of residence in one's adopted city, a pre-requisite for enrollment as a voter. Secondly, what if one is forced, as often happens, to move from one city to another multiple times?

The scale of the problem

A study conducted three years ago had concluded that there are around 100 million temporary internal migrants(http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-27283487). That's 10 times the number of possible NRI voters that our system is worried about. While the EC is keen to provide the facility of a postal ballot for the non-residents, the residents have failed to evoke the same kind of sympathy from the election watchdog.

The solution

The EC can, in fact, learn from its own practices. At least two specific categories of migrants - Kashmiri migrants and Bru/Reang migrants of Manipur, get special arrangements made by the commission for voting in the places they currently inhabit, however far from home. Indeed, the numbers of these migrants are not comparable to the larger constituency of domestic migrants. However, what this suggests is that if there's a will, there's a way.