No voters in 99 polling booths

Ninety-nine polling stations in Delhi are 'haunted' with not a single voter left. The polling stations are among the 9,107 booths which the CEO's office has identified for the December 1 election.

Published on: Nov 29, 2003, 12:09:00 IST

PTI | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Ninety-nine polling stations in Delhi are 'haunted' with not a single voter left.

The polling stations are among the 9,107 booths which the CEO's office has identified for the December 1 election.

For all practical purposes, these polling stations will remain non-functional on the day of polling. No arrangements will be made here, an official said.

The polling stations are identified on the basis of house-to-house surveys to update the electoral rolls. Each station covers a certain number of voters of the constituency. On an average, each booth has 938 voters. The last such survey was done in 2000-01.

"We usually don't change polling stations. Only when there is a dramatic change in the number of voters is an adjustment made," an official said.

Migration is said to be the main reason for these deserted stations.

"As the elections were nearing, a number of MLAs wanted to shift slums from their constituencies. This relocation of slum clusters picked pace and thousands were shifted," he said.

Election Commission officials say these stations can be used as reserve stations in case of a problem in the regular polling stations.

However, this migration has resulted in the creation of new polling stations in some constituencies of east and outer Delhi.

Apart from this, the polling stations in seven assembly constituencies will have two electronic voting machines in each booth.

These constituencies are Saket, Gole Market, Nasirpur, Tuglakabad, Karawal Nagar and Wazirpur.

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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