Out of the 4.54 lakh employees identified for election duty across the State, 56,822 have been granted exemption as per the guidelines set by State Election Commission (SEC).
While 3,286 employees have been exempted on account of serious illness such as cancer, 12,817 have been exempted owing to prolonged illness.
Another 1,776 who had undergone cardiac surgery, 6,858 lactating mothers of children aged below one year, and 2,222 who are in advanced stage of pregnancy have also been exempted.
The differently-abled, nuns and priests, returning and assistant returning officers and essential service providers accounted for the rest of the list.
Even after various exemptions, 2.68 lakh employees are available for election duty against the required 1.51 lakh, including the 10 per cent reserved quota of 13,769 employees.
Thanks to the e-DROP (Electronically Deploying Randomly Officers) for polling duty developed by the Thrissur district centre of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and scaled up to meet the requirements of the entire State, the SEC could complete the arduous job of deployment of polling officials, which took at least a month during previous elections, in just 10 days.
IDs created
Under e-DROP, IDs were created for all 1,043 local bodies in the State and they entered the minimum details of institutions liable to deploy employees for duty based on their professional tax register, which automatically generated user ID and passwords for institutions under their jurisdiction.
Thus, 35,275 institution logins were created and they completed entry of 4,54,725 staff by October 10.
Posting orders
Randomisation to generate the posting orders for the first batch of seven districts set to go to poll on November 2 will be completed on Wednesday and the remaining districts on Friday. e-DROP will automatically randomise the data as per the guidelines set by the SEC.
