Webcasting for polling booths in West Bengal

Trouble-mongers will think twice before creating nuisance within polling booth premises during the Assembly elections in West Bengal as live videos of more than 1,000 critical booths will be directly monitored by the Election Commission through ‘web-casting.'

The general public will also be able to stream the live videos by logging on to the West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer's site.

A first-time initiative in the State elections, the technique will be put to use in more than 150 critical booths across six districts in north Bengal during the first phase of elections on April 18.

Though the information technology cell of the State Election Commission had initially planned to bring almost every polling booth in the State under the ‘web-cast' monitoring process, it had to scale the figure down after problems were faced with internet connectivity and logistics in the way of achieving the initial target.

“We are using a very efficient system named Flash Live Video (FLV) for the purpose that can perform at a very low bandwidth and can stream video from multiple sources and display them on multiple windows at the Commission's office. This will enable the Commission to monitor the situation live in several critical polling booths at once,” a senior official with the IT cell, told The Hindu here on Tuesday.

The official said that the FLV technology could function with any broadband connectivity and did not require any software to run it.

Web-cameras would be mounted on laptops at different polling booth premises.

“While the provision will be most useful for booths located in remote locations, lack of internet connectivity has hampered the effort to reach a larger number of booths this time. We are working on the idea of using mobile phone cameras and iPod cameras to make the provision available to more booths in the next elections,” the official said.