Student Parliament Elections Conducted Online

The elected term of a member of Parliament for the session 2020-2021 was relatively short, considering that the elections took place in March 2021.  Interestingly, the UG2k20 batch did not have any elections to the student parliament this year. The students had consistently raised this issue at multiple instances without any significant progress.  

The problem started when a mail was sent to students@lists.iiit.ac.in and research@iiit.ac.in on the 1st of February, inviting nominations for the members of the Student Parliament. However, UG2k20 was not a part of either mailing list and hence did not receive the email. On February 8^th, another mail was sent by the Election Commission informing about the accepted nominations from each batch.  In this mail, the Election Commission stated that since they received no nominations from the batch, elections would not be held for UG2k20. 

Multiple students mailed the Election Commission, informing them that they were unaware of the nominations and did not receive any mails. The commission replied that UG2k20 would have separate elections in the last week of February or the first week of March after IMS issues were sorted out. Many manifestos were prepared and passed around the batch groups as the students were informed that elections would happen soon. The matter did not proceed further.

On the 22nd of May, a meeting was scheduled with the UG-1 batch, the Dean, the Director, and faculty to discuss general issues and feedback required to be implemented for Term-3. The batch put forward the concern, and the faculty seemed to be surprised at the delay. After the meet, a message was passed around by the Student Parliament, which informed the students that they had access to IMS.

Recently, the Election Commission invited nominations again for the year 2021-2022. The initial deadline for submission of nominations was 1st July. This then got delayed to 2nd July since there were insufficient nominations. Multiple documents having campaign rules, election schedule, election code, and candidate undertaking were sent by the Commission in addition to the invitation. The online voting took place on the 5th of July. 

Online Voting was conducted only for the UG2k19 batch and Research Students (MS/Ph.D. / DD6+) as the rest of the batches had the number of nominations less than or equal to sanctioned seats. The Election Commission felt that it should be studied why the nominations from UG2k20 did not even reach the number of allocated seats.

Editor: Tejasvi Chebrolu