Mumbai, April 19 -- For a significant part of the next five weeks, India will hold elections. These are being held in seven phases for the 17th Lok Sabha. Though the voting systems are different, the eligible voting population of more than 900 million is 3.5 times as large as the United States' and nearly six times larger than those of Indonesia, Japan, Russia and Brazil. One way to imagine the complexity of Indian elections is to think of a single Election Commission (EC) holding elections in all these countries at the same time. The EC will deploy over 10 million polling and security staff, over 50 helicopters and 600 trains to conduct the exercise across nearly one million polling stations. The logistics related to Indian elections have ...