Beginning October 1, the Delhi electoral office plans to initiate a massive awareness drive to encourage youngsters turning 18 to enrol themselves as voters.
Those turning 18-year-old by January 1, 2017, are eligible to enrol themselves in the electoral rolls of the capital and the office of Delhi’s Chief Electoral Officer is planning a large-scale outreach programme to encourage the young voters to apply for it.
Recently, the electoral office had held special camps at Delhi University to target youngsters who has joined during the new academic session. As part of the initiative, posters made by fine art students were put up across the North Campus.
Reaching out
“As part of the special summary revision that would begin from October 1, we will initiate a massive awareness programme targeting young voters,” Chandra Bhushan Kumar, Delhi’s Chief Electoral Officer told The Hindu .
“Apart from trying to reach out to young voters at colleges, schools and other educational institutions, we will also rope in residents welfare associations and other organisations to target them at residential areas. We will also put out a large number of advertisements in the media as part of the exercise,” he said.
The electoral office has been trying to target different focus groups such as women, homeless, migrant workers among others to ensure 100 per cent enrolment.
The Electoral office is carrying out the ‘purification’ of electoral rolls in Delhi to cull out repeat entries, dead voters and anomalies as part of the National Electoral Rolls purification (NERP) drive launched by the Election Commission of India.
Usually, the number of young voters enrolling themselves goes up before an election, but with no elections taking place in Delhi after the Assembly elections in February 2015, there has been a slight dip in enrolment. Also, with elections for the Assembly or the Lok Sabha not happening any time soon, it is possible that young voters might not show the expected enthusiasm.
“The participation of young voters was not that enthusiastic last year, but we have arranged camps this year and it has been comparatively good. Still, there is a gap in numbers and we are hopeful we will be able to see better participation,” Mr. Kumar had told The Hindu earlier.
The number of voters in the age group of 18-19 years was 1,28,678 in January 2016.
