The State government has completed a survey mandated by the Election Commission (EC) to understand the reasons for non-participation of registered voters in the election process, and has submitted it to the State electoral office here.
"The information technology division, which has done the KABBP baseline survey, has informed that the work (of survey) has been completed and all documents related to it have been submitted to Chief Electoral Officer, Madhya Pradesh," Directorate of Economic and Statistics said in reply to a RTI query. The department, however, refused to give a copy of the baseline KABBP (knowledge, attitude, behaviour, belief and practices) survey of voters to RTI activist Ajay Dubey, who had filed the query.
The Election Commission had in January asked the chief electoral officers (CEOs) of poll-bound Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Mizoram, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh to get the baseline KABBP survey of voters done by May 30. The CEOs of these states were asked to engage the services of a suitable and competent institute or agency to carry out the survey with the approval of the Election Commission.
"The baseline survey was completed sometime in late August, much beyond the time limit given by the Election Commission. There is a lot of discrepancy. We had filed several RTIs to get its copy but were repeatedly denied for one or the other reason," Dubey alleged. He demanded that the result of the survey be put in the public domain for greater transparency. The main objective of the survey is to understand the extent and level of knowledge, belief, perception, readiness, trends, factors, reasons of participation and non- participation of registered voters in the election process.
A copy of the survey form containing questions was provided to Dubey. Some of the questions in the survey were: What according to you are main reasons for not participating in election processIJ Did you have any security related concerns at the time of electionIJ