2014 polls: India heads for highest turnout

India’s voters have come out in emphatic numbers as never seen before in during the first four phases of this summer’s general elections. If the trend continues, the 2014 polls may have the highest voter turnout ever even though the hot summer is considered a big stumbling block.

Updated on: Apr 17, 2014, 03:14:28 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s voters have come out in emphatic numbers as never seen before in during the first four phases of this summer’s general elections. If the trend continues, the 2014 polls may have the highest voter turnout ever even though the hot summer is considered a big stumbling block.

As many as 68.29% of voters in 111 Lok Sabha seats that have gone to the polls so far exercised their franchise. This is about eight percentage points higher than the polling percentage in these constituencies in 2009. The overall polling percentage in 2009 was 58.19% when 714 million people were eligible to vote.

Historically, the highest polling ever recorded was 61.97% in 1998.

A lot had changed in the Indian electoral system since 1998. Electronic voting machines were introduced, the distance between homes and the polling booths were reduced and poll officers now remind voters of their Constitutional right a day before polling.

“The polling time is now 11 hours and we also provided basic minimum facilities for voters at the booths,” said Akshay Rout, who heads the voter awareness division in the Election Commission.

Measures like getting top Bollywood icons such as Aamir Khan to be the EC’s brand ambassador, ridding electoral rolls of fake voters, and increasing awareness in villages and small towns have helped bring about a big jump in people’s participation in the world’s biggest electoral exercise.

“The jump in voting numbers would not have been possible without the work of lakhs of polling officers at the ground level for months,” Rout added.

Of the 13 states and union territories where elections have been held, polling increased, except in Sikkim and Nagaland. The fall in polling in Sikkim has been attributed to heavy rains on polling day, April 12 and in Sikkim the drop was not significant.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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