Jalandhar: A day after, poll percentage up marginally, but still 6.19% less than 2017

Deepkamal Kaur

Jalandhar, February 21

Post data updation that went on till early morning on Monday, there was slight increase in the poll percentage from 65.2 per cent getting reported till late Sunday evening to finally 66.97 per cent.

While earlier there were reports that 10.86 lakh people from Jalandhar district had voted for the nine Assembly segments, the figure got revised to 11.16 lakh this morning. Out of the total revised figure, 5.71 lakh men and 5.45 lakh women have voted in Jalandhar. While going number-wise, men have polled more votes, but going percentage wise it is women who are taking the lead. Nearly 68.1 per cent women have polled votes against 65.91 per cent men.

A day after it has now become clear that there is a fall of 6.19 per cent from 73.16 per cent votes polled in 2017, several factors are learnt to be accounted for this time. “There has been a mass migration of Doabites to foreign lands in the past five years. Many youngsters too have moved to Canada and other countries but they still have their votes here. So they remained absent during polling this time and hence a more pronounced downfall of vote percentage in Doaba,” said Des Raj Kali, a political analyst.

Several candidates, too, said that when we got the electoral rolls and we were going door to door, they found so many houses locked. “If six members were registered in a house, only three-four stayed behind. Youth in most families of the age 20-32 were found to have moved to Canada, Australia, Dubai and other countries. But their names were in the lists,” said Gurpartap Singh Wadala.

Election Kanugo Jalandhar Rakesh said: “We understand that there has been a lot of movement of youth abroad but we cannot delete their votes as they have their home and families here. Ideally, such youth who get the PRs abroad should ideally get their names deleted from the general voters’ list and get themselves added in NRI voter list. But they do not get it done. Many NRIs do not get their votes deleted from here for they have land and property, which they want to continue to manage keeping an Indian ID. Clearly, we have only 73 NRI voters listed with us, which is negligible as compared to the actual figure.”