Rangarajan

Chennai, Feb. 28: S. Rangarajan, who invented the electronic voting machine and made polling fast and tamper-proof yet simple, died of pneumonia here last night at the age of 72.

The electronics engineer, who also wrote novels and stories in Tamil under the pen-name “Sujatha”, had invented the device for a trade union election but ended up revolutionising polling in the world’s largest democracy.

Rangarajan was deputy general manager (research and development) at the Bangalore-based Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) when he “conceptualised” the machine in the 1980s, a senior BEL official said over the phone.

The public sector company’s large workforce was to elect a union and Rangarajan thought it would be nice to have a system of voting that was fast and had anti-tamper security features.

The first EVMs were fairly successful. “Having seen the utility of it, we had bigger ambitions,” the BEL official said.

Rangarajan, heading a team of 12, ensured that even illiterates had no trouble operating the machine and that it revealed the count almost instantaneously.

When the BEL felt confident about its product, it offered the gadget to the Election Commission in 1989.