A technical researcher based in Hyderabad, Hari Prasad, who has carried out research on Indian electronic voting machines (EVM) and was arrested for stealing an EVM unit form Mumbai, will apply for bail on health grounds.

Prasad has co-authored a page on Indian electronic voting machines with a researcher from the US and one from the Netherlands. He has claimed publicly that the EVMs used in the country are not tamper proof.

Prasad was arrested on Saturday on charges of stealing EVM with serial number E-131812 from Old Custom House in Mumbai. He surrendered to a team of Mumbai Police in Hyderabad to register his protest against the system.

Prasad, who is the managing director of NetIndia Pvt Ltd and also works as the technical coordinator of VeTA (Citizens for Verifiability, Transparency and Accountability in Elections), has been booked under IPC sections 454, 457 and 380 for housebreaking and theft. The police is still searching for the machine which Prasad says he has returned to a government official back in April.

Prasad has claimed on TV that a machine can be changed with look-alike components that can change votes and the signals can be tracked on a mobile device and a small device can also be used to change the stored votes.

Save Indian Democracy, an NGO which is backing Prasad said in a letter to Chief Election Commissioner S. Y. Quraishi that the efforts of the researcher was to educate Indian public and the path taken was only to work around the "unrealistic and dishonest" restrictions put in place by the Election Commission in bringing out the flaws in the EVMs.