Uttar Pradesh is one of the largest states of the country and holding elections of Urban Local Bodies (ULB) in the state is a mammoth task with 728 seats (12 Nagar Nigam, 194 Nagar Palika & 422 Nagar Panchayat) in contention, around 35000 polling stations/booths and little more than 3 crore voters. More than 2 lakh officials are deployed across the state during the elections and various activities have to be coordinated to have free and fair elections in the state. In the recently held urban local body election in May-July 2012, Uttar Pradesh took a major step forward by automating and customising the complete Election Personal Deployment System (EPDS) in order to maintain standardisation & ensure transparency in the deployment system (ULB EPDS).

The ULB EPDS system was developed after a detailed study of manual process; it has adopted the best practices observed in other states and also takes into account suggestion and feedback given by Election Commission of India (ECI) & the State Election Commission minimising the manual intervention in the deployment process. The system was rolled out in all districts to have common software across the state and the application also generates various kinds of reports required by the District Administration & the State Election Commission.

ULB EPDS is a fully menu driven and helps the district administration in entire process of personnel management. It is based on the randomisation technique and is used for the Deployment of Polling Personnel, Polling Parties, Counting Personnel, Sector Magistrates and Zonal Magistrate.  The application provides information of booth entry, sector and zone entry etc. and user/role based security has been inbuilt into the system for each job like personnel data entry, booth entry, deployment etc.

This ULB EPDS system has standardized the election personnel deployment system across the state. It has not only benefited the district administration but has also provided a platform to manage and monitor the process at the state level. The efforts of the entire NIC team of Sh. S.B. Singh, DDG & SIO, UP, Sh. Rashid Hussain Technical Director, Sh. Shailesh Srivastava, PSA, Sh. Raj Kumar Gupta, PSA & Sh. Ritesh Bihari, Assistant Programmer has been appreciated for bringing a change in the process.