India Untold: How A Mumbai Factory Made Over 12 Lakh Ballot Boxes For India's First Election

As Independent India prepared for its first general elections in 1952, history was being quietly crafted inside a bustling factory in the suburbs of Mumbai's Vikhroli. Within the walls of Plant 1 at Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd., workers were engaged in manufacturing the nation's very first ballot boxes.

It was late 1951, and while to the outside world the factory seemed to be running as usual, inside, it was the heart of a nation-building exercise. Archives reveal that in just four months, 12.83 lakh ballot boxes were produced in the Vikhroli plant.“A newspaper, Bombay Chronicle, had printed an article on December 15, 1951, saying the factory was manufacturing 15,000 ballot boxes a day. This, without affecting the production of any of their other products like safes, cupboards, cabinets and locks, proves that the workers at the factory were putting in extra hours every day to ensure that the ballot boxes were readied in time,” said Vrunda Pathare, chief archivist at Godrej.

Originally, Godrej had been tasked with producing 12.24 lakh ballot boxes, but the company ended up delivering more than ordered.“It's probably because orders were given to other companies as well and those who did not finish them in time passed the order on to Godrej in the end,” an official from the archives division explained.

Cost of each olive-green ballot box?

Each olive-green ballot box cost a modest Rs 5 to make and was the product of rigorous testing. 50 designs were experimented with before the final version was approved. Ingeniously, the internal locking mechanism was designed by a factory hand, Nathalal Panchal, after it was discovered that using an external lock would make the box costlier.“We have anecdotal evidence that Panchal played a key role in suggesting the design for the internal locking mechanism,” added Pathare.

Ballot Boxes Used In Loksabha and State Elections From 1952 Till 1993( Election Museum , Delhi ) twitter/aQfeYWJEiu

- indianhistorypics (@IndiaHistorypic) January 24, 2023

That tale lives on in the company's oral history project of 2006, when officials interviewed the then plant manager, KR Thanewala. Recalling those days, Thanewala said,“Pirojsha Godrej (the owner) would come to the factory at 3 o'clock every afternoon asking us how it was going. And he got orders from other companies who had not somehow or the other managed to make them (ballot boxes). The mechanism was tested. Every box had to be checked. Click when it closes and click it should open. Once it was closed, without putting your finger inside and pulling the string, you cannot unlock it.”

By February 1952, all the ballot boxes had been manufactured, carefully inspected, and dispatched via railway wagons to 22 states across the country, ready for India's tryst with democracy. Thanewala fondly remembered the process of transporting them:“...We had to walk to the station and back. And...I did a lot of night shifts. At night we (used to) light mashaals (torches) and with the mashaal, I used to walk from the railway tracks up to Vikhroli station. It was great fun.”

MENAFN21092025007385015968ID1110089143