As Delhi gears up for the state assembly polls on 4 December, political parties get ready to woo voters. But the task of carrying out safe and more importantly fair elections in India’s capital rests with the office of Delhi’s Chief Electoral officer. Firstpost spoke to Vijay Dev, the chief electoral officer for Delhi and the person who will handle most of the operations in this years election process. Edited excerpts from the interview. First, which are the sensitive polling booths that the EC office in Delhi has marked out? Also how is a booth declared sensitive? What preparations are taken to ensure safe and fair elections here? We define sensitive polling stations in each area and the details of these are kept secret. 600 critical polling stations have been identified in this election. We have undertaken a detailed security plan in areas as well. These 600 locations will be catered to in a concentrated manner where deployment of security forces is concerned, compared to normal polling stations. There are a few key factors that determine why a booth is put in the sensitive or ultra-sensitive category. If the place has a history of violence, if it is sensitive in terms of communal situation, or has too much caste divide. Areas fielding candidates with a history of political violence are also marked as sensitive polling booths. Reuters How has the voter registration drive been this year? Has your office targeted a particular section of the population for voter registration? The number of voters goes up after each election. We will be releasing the final numbers soon after the last date of nominations in Delhi which is 16 November.
By 20 November, the final number of voters should be out. In any case the number of voters we are expecting will be 1 crore and 17 lakh. ( In the previous election Delhi had One crore, 7 lakh voters) We have concentrated on enrollment of deficient categories, which are women, homeless persons, youth (aged 18 and 19 in particular ) and transgender. In the 18 to 19 years age group (first time voters) we had only 98,000 registered when we started our registration drive. Now we have more than 3,80,000 youth registered. We started our campaign in all colleges, schools (for class 11th and 12th) and we chose campus ambassadors from both students and faculty to help increase registration in this group. Youth, we have been able to register quite substantially. Gender ratio in Delhi’s electoral roll had been quite bad, some 788 women per 1000 males. In some areas it was even lower at 600 women voters per 1000 males. We started a major drive for this as well by identifying areas with low female voter registration. We set up all women staff camps to help women voters get comfortable as some did not want to deal with male staff. The gender ratio has increased to 808 per 1000 males. This is the first time in the history of Delhi that the electors gender ratio has crossed 800. In the homeless category, we had only 62 persons registered at the beginning. Again our drive in streets, footpaths, etc helped and we have over 8000 homeless people registered. In transgender we started with nil but now we have 500. We have the category of ‘other’ available as well, but sometimes they want to be registered as females or males so it’s a hit and miss at times.
(Anurangan & Varun kapoor)
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