Enthusiastic response in rural areas

Maintaining the trends of other elections, the Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon poll on Sunday remained a flop show among urban voters and huge participation by rural voters. HT reports.

Maintaining the trends of other elections, the Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon poll on Sunday remained a flop show among urban voters and huge participation by rural voters.

HT Image

Hundreds of voters stood in a serpentine queue in Saraswati Vihar (which falls in rural area of Chakarpur village) whereas a handful of voters came out to vote from Essel Towers.

People living in gated community with 100 percent power back-up and assured supply of water from borewells do not seem to feel the need for voting for civic polls.

Not only in Essel Towers, the trend was palpable in all big townships such as DLF, Heritage City, Garden Estate and Silver Oaks.

In American Montessari polling booth of DLF, only 199 votes were cast out of 986, which make it a little more than 20% of votes whereas in Heritage City, the turnout was even worse with 19.37%. In Garden Estate and Silver Oaks, situation was relatively better where 25% of the voters turned up. A person on election duty in Essel Towers told HT: “High flying people stay here in this area. They don’t bother to come down to the polling booth to vote, that too for the corporation elections.”

The pattern was similar in 2005 when RWAs formed the Gurgaon Residents Party (GRP) and fielded their candidate in state assembly elections. The candidate got only 5,836 votes. The response was same in 2009 when RWA candidate RS Rathee got 5,951, less than five percent of the total number of voters. In both cases, low turnout at booths in urban localities was the major reason behind the candidates’ debacle.