CHENNAI: The progress in preparation of photo electoral rolls in Tamil Nadu is not encouraging and Chief Electoral Officer Naresh Gupta has asked District Election Officers to speed up the programme.

Mr. Gupta told The Hindu here that though the State electoral machinery started the programme in July 2006, the progress had not been as expected.

Going by the pace of the work, it would take three or four months to get the photo rolls published, as draft rolls for the revision exercise would have January 1, 2007 as the qualifying date.

Asked about the progress made by other States, he said the work had been completed for all the Assembly segments in Kerala and Puducherry and States such as West Bengal had made considerable headway. In Tamil Nadu, the preliminary work of retrieving images from compact discs and miniature sheets and merging them with the voters' data had been completed. The first round of field verification was also over, Mr. Gupta said.

However, images had to be captured for the residual voters who formed around 30 per cent of the electorate. The percentage of the residual voters differed from constituency to constituency. The task was being carried out by setting up of designated centres or house-to-house visits by personnel with digital cameras.

In some areas, passport size photographs were being collected from voters, he said, stressing the need for speeding up the coverage by deploying more digital cameras.

The slow progress in the preparation of the photo rolls was attributed to the local body elections, administrative problems and monsoon. Mr. Gupta said when he called a review meeting for the western region on November 20, many Collectors could not participate owing to heavy rain.

In view of the difficulties faced by the State electoral machinery, it has been decided to conduct the review in small groups of Collectors at different places to cover the entire State by the third week of December.

After the review meeting in Coimbatore, the CEO held meetings with Kancheepuram and Tiruvallur Collectors and the Commissioner of the Chennai Corporation on Monday.

The next review meeting will be held in Kanyakumari district on December 12, followed by one in Madurai on December 13.

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