9,000 engineering students will webcast election process across Telangana to ensure fair polls

HYDERABAD: On behalf of the Election Commission, nearly 9,000 software engineering students from various technical institutions across Telangana will webcast proceedings from polling stations. While all the polling stations in Hyderabad will be covered by the students, webcasting will be available only at selected polling booths in other districts.


“We have selected over 4,200 students to webcast the entire polling procedure at 3,870 booths in the city,” said Mushraf Ali, additional commissioner for information technology, Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC). “We will give them a web-cam, an internet dongle, and a pen drive. We have directed them to record the proceedings, save it, and submit it to us in the pen drive by the end of the day on December 7.”


A large number of students have been pooled in from Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies (RGUKT), Basar, to webcast poll proceedings in districts such as Khammam, Kamareddy, Nizamabad, Nirmal and Adilabad. Of the 9,000 selected students, almost 1,550 are from RGUKT.


“The primary objective of drafting our students was to provide a glimpse of how the election process works,” said A Ashok, in-charge vicechancellor of RGUKT. “Except first year students, all others have volunteered to participate in webcasting. Since we use ICT-based curriculum, webcasting among other such techniques comes naturally to students. Webcasting for polling will give them practical exposure for more such events in the future.” Faculty members from the university will also accompany the students at the polling booths.

The students have been given two-day training on webcasting and web-recording. Karthik B, a student, said: “We were taught how to use Live Media Encoder. Right from installing the software to operating it in real time during the polls, we were given hands-on training.”