Separate godowns will be built to store Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines in Bihar for which Rs 200 crore would be spent, state chief electoral officer Ajay V. Nayak said on Wednesday.

The Election Commission of India suggested that funds for constructing these godowns be provided in equal proportion by the Centre and the state concerned but a final call is yet to be taken.

'We have 38 godowns which were constructed for storing EVMs. Out of these, eight can accommodate VVPATs as well. Hence 30 more would be constructed for storing VVPATs,' chief electoral officer Nayak said.

Nayak said the aim was to have the facility in place by October 2018, by when the required number of VVPATs would be available with the state.

The use of VVPAT along with all electronic voting machines during elections has become compulsory now in the wake of a recent directive from the Supreme Court in this regard. Bihar has 62,780 polling booths and around 88,000 EVMs were used at these booths in the last Assembly election.

The number of polling booths is likely to increase by the next Lok Sabha elections, scheduled to be held in 2019, in the wake of increase in the number of voters.

As far as the first full-fledged use of VVPATs is concerned, the same would be happen during the bypoll to Araria parliamentary seat.

The bypoll has been necessitated following the death of Araria MP Mohammad Taslimuddin.

The Election Commission of India has not yet announced dates for the bypoll.

Nayak also shared information about the special drive launched by the Commission for adding new voters in the electoral rolls and also getting details of existing voters corrected in case of errors.

The draft electoral roll for Bihar was published on Wednesday.

Those having any objections to entries can apply for corrections by October 31.

All applications received during the period would be disposed of by November 30 and a final electoral roll would be published on January 10, 2018. According to the figures in the draft electoral roll, 9,02,383 more voters were added to the previous electoral roll, published on January 10.

While the number of male voters went up by 4,36,452, that of women voters increased by 4,65,778.

The number of third gender voters went up by 152 during the same period.

According to the draft electoral roll there are 69,321,711 voters in Bihar out of which 36,782,873 are male voters and 32,536,566 are female voters. The number of third gender voters stands at 2,119.

The Election Commission of India has issued a directive to the state government that officials involved in electoral roll revision work cannot be transferred from in the period commencing from October 4 this year to January 10 next year.