Chennai : The Indian Organisation for Developmental Action (INODA), a non-governmental organisation, has launched a drive to ensure that all voters in Mylapore constituency exercise their franchise.

The voters' list for the area will be put up in each street. Welfare organisations will hold meetings on the importance of voting and local residents will urge their neighbours to go to the polling booths on election day.

At a preliminary meeting on Sunday here to decide on the action plan, INODA founder V.Narayanan said that one of the main problems faced by voters is that they do not know which polling booth they have to go to.

"Mylapore constituency has 1,242 streets and 182 polling booths. We will tell people where their booth is located," Mr. Narayanan said. The constituency map that the Election Commission has provided along with the voters' list will also be pasted at prominent points on every street.

Mr. Narayanan is a member of the Pradesh Congress Committee and the TNCC. However, he stressed that INODA's goal would be to get people out to vote rather than tell them who to vote. He said that the drive would be carried out with fanfare so that the whole neighbourhood gets interested in the electoral process. He also hoped that Mylapore would become a model constituency, which would inspire other organisations to take up the drive in their own localities.

Plan of action

Residents of Mylapore constituency working with INODA have volunteered to paste the final voters' list on their compound walls so that people can verify if their names are included. This saves voters the trouble of going to Corporation offices to check the list. Mylapore constituency has approximately 2.1 lakh voters.

Resident welfare associations will conduct meetings where the final list would be shown to the participants. Some volunteers have also agreed to make telephone calls to about 100 neighbours on the day of the polls to remind and urge them to vote.

Vanaja Krishnamoorthy, a resident of Jeevarathnam Nagar in Adyar said: "I know most of the people in division 152 as I had earlier contested in the Corporation council elections. So I plan to urge all of them to cast their vote."

INODA's past president C.R.Sasi says that steps would be taken to encourage first-time voters in colleges, universities and polytechnics. He also said that booths must be disabled-friendly, so that the physically-challenged come to vote.

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