Election Commission has ordered 26 lakh indelible ink bottles worth Rs 33 crore

New Delhi, Mar 24: Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, the Election Commission has ordered 26 lakh indelible ink bottles worth Rs 33 crore. The seven-phase election will begin on April 11 and conclude on May 19. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the poll panel had bought 21.5 lakh phials, 4.5 lakh less than this year. Mysore Paints and Varnish Ltd, a government of Karnataka undertaking, is the only authorised manufacturer of indelible ink for the EC. 

Managing Director, Mysore Paints, Chandrashekhar Doddamani told PTI that the company has received an order for 26 lakh phials of 10cc each from the EC. "The expected turnover is approximately Rs 33 crore," he said. The order, Doddamani said, is higher than the last general elections by 4.5 lakh phials. In this election, nearly 90 crore people are eligible to case their votes for which the EC will set up nearly 10 lakh polling stations across the country.

In 1962, the Election Commission, in collaboration with the Law Ministry, National Physical Laboratory and National Research Development Corporation, had made an agreement with Mysore Paints for supply of indelible ink for Lok Sabha and assembly elections. Since then, it has been supplying the ink for elections in India. A bottle of indelible ink contains 10 cubic centimetres (cc). As per modern measurement methods, one cubic centimetre is equivalent to one millilitre.

Mysore Paints exports indelible ink to more than 30 countries across the globe. Soon after the note ban, the company was asked to provide indelible ink to banks to mark customers exchanging defunct currency notes to check suspicious deposits. Grappling with unending queues and frayed tempers in banks and to check operation of syndicates after the note ban, the government had introduced the system of marking customers exchanging defunct currency notes with indelible ink.