Technical glitches made filing nomination forms online a cumbersome task on the last day for submissions
For all the talk about digital India, political parties were none too pleased about having to file their nomination forms for the BMC elections online.
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As yesterday was the last day for filing submissions, candidates scrambled to fill out the online forms. But whether it was due to heavy online traffic on the website's servers, or just faulty coding, senior party leaders and spokespersons said that their party hopefuls had faced several issues.
"I have received some complaints from Mankhurd and Borivli areas, where they were facing some technical problems while filling in the form online. Some of their forms were being rejected and they were being asked to submit offline," said Sanjay Nirupam, president of the Mumbai Congress Committee. "They (candidates) were not happy with the online procedure."
'Six-hour process'
"It has taken some of us around six hours to fill in the forms online — it is so complicated," said MNS corporator Sandip Deshpande. "Even after filling in the online forms, we have to go and submit the physical copies of our affidavits. Just because the Election Commission officials want to reduce their work of uploading the physical forms, they are making us do it for them."
"There have been some reports of issues regarding the reserved category, but I haven't personally received any complaints," said Shiv Sena spokesperson Manisha Kayande. "We will have to check with Sena Bhavan for more details."
The only party that didn't seem to have any problem with the online submissions was the BJP. "We have not received a single complaint from our candidates," said BJP spokesperson Niranjan Shetty.
As of 4 pm yesterday, 7,400 out of 7,600 forms were filled in on the BMC's online portal by candidates.
EC says
"For 1,268 seats in Maharashtra municipal corporations, we have received more than 29,000 nominations and applications online," said J Saharia, State Election Commissioner.
"There could have been some problems because candidates must have taken longer than the stipulated time to fill in the online forms, hence the forms would have to be reloaded.
The traffic on the servers was not even at 30 per cent of its capacity, that is what our data centre says."
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