It is not enough for youth to participate in national elections and state elections only as local body polls too are equally important considering municipal bodies deal with key civic infrastructure of roads, drains, streetlighting, sanitation, public health, safety and other basic amenities, said State Election Authority for urban local body (ULB) elections and Director of Municipal Administration T.K. Sridevi on Monday.
Addressing students at the CBIT engineering college as part of the voters awareness campaign being taken up across the municipal regions, she said that if young and first time voters do not participate in the voting it only meant they are not taking part in the decision making process.
Urging them to become ‘ambassadors of democracy’, she pointed out that “democracy provides for negotiation and by voting you are improving your negotiating power. Our country is one of the youngest nations in demographic terms and if youth show apathy, then there’s no redemption.”
The Municipal Administration and Urban Development Department has made lot of efforts this year to increase the voters awareness, she said and expected the voters slip distribution by the municipal bodies going for polls to be efficient enough to make people come out and vote in large numbers.
Ms. Sridevi said there were quite a few municipal bodies in the suburbs going for polls and students studying in some of the educational institutions around are residents and hence, as voters they should exercise their franchise without fail.
“It is not enough to have 70% voting percentage for municipalities when it is above 90% in panchayat polls. We need to increase the figure because as many as 129 ULBs are going to polls this time compared to 56 last time,” she exhorted.
The top five municipalities with high voting percentages in the last ULB polls in 2014 are — Ibrahimpatnam – 86.37%, Narsampet – 85.52%, Husnabad – 85.09%, Madhira – 84.27% and Ieeja – 84.20% . The lows are in — Adilabad – 59.42%, Mancherial – 65.93%, Badangpet – 67.47%, Kamareddy – 67.62 and Metpally – 68.16%.
Among municipal corporations poll percentage has been — Nizamabad – 54.88%, Karimnagar – 59.62% and Ramagundam – 67.40%. GHMC in 2016 polls recorded just 45.12%!
