Kolkata, Nov 20 (IANS) To get more young people to vote, the Election Commission (EC) is planning to issue temporary Electronic Photo Identity Cards (EPIC) to students settled outside their home states.
“We’re discussing about this facility with our Chief Electoral Officers (CEO) so that an 18-year-old student, who is studying in any outside state for more than six months, can have a temporary EPIC to exercise his franchise.

“In that case, the student has to be a resident of a hostel there and his new enrolment will be done, following the EC norms, through the academic institution to which he belongs,” Chief Election Commissioner Navin Chawla said here Friday.

He said the idea was still under discussion.

“There’s no concrete thing on this so far. I was just discussing about it with West Bengal CEO Debashis Sen today (Friday),” he said, adding “One of the challenges I want to address in the days to come is to make young voters participate in the voting process.”

Chawla said the EC had appointed officers who can go door to door to check on voters.

“If we can have a clean polling process, it will help us reduce the number of bogus electorates from the list. Booth level officers can carry out extensive surveys to enrol the real voters.”

He said there are altogether 835,000 polling booths across India.