Two consultants however joined the Election Commission (EC) Secretariat yesterday and three others, including two from abroad, are expected to join in a couple of days.

After appointing the consultants, the EC will hold a meeting with them and discuss creating the voter list with photographs and the national identity cards, sources said.

"The consultants will start working on the first working day of the next month," Election Commissioner Sahul Hossain told reporters yesterday.

Sources in the EC Secretariat however said the consultants are expected to start working in full swing from May 6 as the first working day of the month on May 3 is bracketed by national and weekly holidays.

CEC ATM Shamsul Huda on April 5 in a news conference disclosed that no election will be held in the next 18 months, as that is the minimum required time for completing the job. He also said counting of 18 months will begin from the day the consultants will start their work.

Election Commissioner Sahul Hossain said the consultants will have the project proposal ready within the next two months and the EC will complete other preparatory works, like procurement of materials, within the next four months. Then implementation of the project will begin, which will take 12 months to be completed, the election commissioner added.

So, if everything goes as planned, the 18-month timeframe will end in the first week of November next year. In the meantime the chief adviser to the caretaker government recently announced that the stalled ninth parliamentary election will be held by the end of 2008.

The CEC and two other election commissioners have been repeatedly saying that the timeframe set is the required minimum for preparing a voter list with photographs.

"We will welcome, if anybody have any idea for doing the job in four months," Election Commissioner Brig Gen (retd) M Sakhawat Hossain told reporters yesterday adding, "We will not retreat from our position of preparing a voter list with photographs."

Asked whether the 18-month timeframe will become a 19-month one, as a month since the time of the announcement of the timeframe will already be gone before the consultants will start working, Election Commissioner Sakhawat said, "I can't respond to such a technical question. Preparation of the voter list might require less than 18 months or it might require an additional 15 to 20 days."

The election commissioner however claimed that the EC is not sitting idle. "We are working hard and have advanced a lot," he said.

"The voter list will be prepared only once to be used for holding elections to the parliament, upazila parishads, union parishads, and the municipalities. Besides, we don't want to revisit January 11," he said hinting at the recent proclamation of the state of emergency amid a grave political situation centring a discord between two opposing political alliances regarding a grossly flawed voter list.

About the growing demand for holding the election as soon as possible, Election Commissioner Sakhawat said it seems that politicians cannot live without elections. "The people don't think like the politicians regarding elections," he said.

Meanwhile, Prof SM Lutful Kabir, director of the Institute of Information and Communication Technology of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Buet), and AR Azimul Hoque Raihan, chief executive officer of NEWAGE InfoTech Services Ltd, joined the EC Secretariat yesterday.

Talking to The Daily Star yesterday Prof Kabir said the EC will hold a meeting with them very soon. "We will understand their [EC's] requirements once the meeting is held," he said.

"It's our responsibility to prepare a project proposal for the voter list, national identity cards, and for the introduction of e-governance. I think it will require two to three months to complete the task," Prof Kabir said.

"Our task is to prepare guidelines for voter registration," another consultant Azimul said.

They also said two foreign consultants, an Australian and a Swedish, were supposed to arrive in Dhaka yesterday.

Another consultant, who will deal with procurement, will join later.

EC SECRETARIAT
Election Commissioners Sahul Hossain and Sakhawat said the EC in principle decided to seek opinion from constitution experts on whether it is possible to free the EC Secretariat from the control of the Prime Minister's Office without amending the constitution.

"We have found that it is not possible to separate the secretariat from the Prime Minister's Office without amending the constitution. But some legal experts are saying that an amendment to the constitution is not required for it," Sahul Hossain said.

"Now, we will examine whether there is a way to separate the secretariat without amending the constitution," he added.

The EC wants to have an independent secretariat like the one exists in Jatiya Sangsad, the election commissioners said.

"We don't want to free the EC Secretariat just on papers...We want independence in everything including budget preparation and recruitment ... It should be like the Parliament Secretariat," Election Commissioner Sakhawat said.

"At the moment our top priority is to prepare the voter list, not the EC Secretariat's independence," he added.