DARJEELING,: Preparations are on for the polls to be
held for Darjeeling Parliamentary constituency. District administration today informed that
training of officers involved in the election process is going on and seven
companies of Central Armed Police Force (CAPF) have been deployed for the area.
Darjeeling will vote in the second phase
on April 26 with nominations of candidates starting on March 28.
“The gazette notification will be out on
March 28th when the filing of nominations will also start. This will continue
till 4th April with the scrutiny of the nominations to be done on 5th April and
the last day of withdrawal being 8th April. The counting is scheduled to be held
on 4th June with the process of elections to be completed before 6th June,”
said Darjeeling district magistrate Priety Goyal.
In Darjeeling Parliamentary
constituency, there are seven election constituencies with five of them falling
under Darjeeling district, one in Uttar Dinajpur district, which is Chopra, and
one in Kalimpong district. This time around, the number of total voters for the
constituency stands at 17,53,699 out of which 8,78,148 are male electors and
8,75,509 female electors. Forty-two are registered as third gender voters.
According to the Darjeeling DM, there
will be 1,999 polling stations in Darjeeling PC including 410 in urban areas
and 1,589 in rural areas.
“The absentee voters will be voting
through postal ballot. There are 13, 326 PWD electors and 10, 629 who fall in
the age of 85 plus. They will be given an option where we will give them a form
where they will express their willingness if they want to come to polling
stations or whether they want to vote through postal ballot staying at their
home. Those who want to come to polling stations and have disabilities we will
be arranging wheelchairs for them,” said Goyal while adding that for the 11,197
service voters, there is Electronically Transmitted Postal Ballot System.
The DM added that they have already
started training of officers involved in the election process with a training session
of polling personnel to be held soon. She said that the Systematic Voters
Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) activity is also going on full
swing and hoped that this time there will be greater voter turnout than the
last polls.
“We have formed 152 teams for Model Code of
Conduct (MCC) and 139 teams for C-vigil. For expenditure monitoring, we have
formed 57 Flying Surveillance Teams (FST), 65 for Static Surveillance Teams
(SST), 46 for Video Surveillance Teams (VST) and accounting teams. We have formed
complaint helpline numbers and a toll-free number of 1950 which will be working
from the district headquarter of Darjeeling,” she said.
This election, the Dispersion Centre and
Receipt Centre (DCRC) for Kalimpong will be the Scottish University of Mission
Institute (SUMI) and for Darjeeling, it will be the Darjeeling Government
College with them also being the counting venues. For Kurseong, the DCRC will
be at St. Alphonsus High School while counting will take place at Darjeeling.
For Siliguri, Phansidewa and Matigara Assembly constituencies, the DCRC and
counting will be done in Siliguri College and for Chopra the DCRC will be set
up in Islampur College at Islampur with the counting to be done in Siliguri.
