As many young voters are gearing up to cast their votes for the first time in the 16th Lok Sabha Elections, a few students are also preparing to play a role in ensuring the smooth conduct of the polls.
More than 900 students across the Madurai Parliamentary constituency are being trained for election duty ahead of the polling day on April 24. The students will help with the video monitoring of sensitive polling booths in the constituency and will facilitate the streaming of proceedings for the Election officials to monitor.
The students are from colleges such as The Madura College, Vivekananda College, Anna University and the Government Arts College, Melur.
The students will facilitate the video recording and online streaming procedure in the 900-odd booths in the constituency.
While 749 booths will have online webcasting, where the proceedings can be viewed on the internet by the Election Commission officials, 151 booths will have offline webcasting where the proceedings will be recorded for future viewing, if needed. The student webcasters would be posted at these 900 booths as ‘webcam operators.’
The key resource persons, who are training the students, said that since many of them were first time voters, they were shown pictures and videos of the poll booths and the functioning of an Electronic Voting Machine.
“The students are currently being trained on the technical aspects of how to use the software to stream the proceedings in the polling booth online. We have sourced laptops from different departments which are currently being updated to enable video monitoring,” a senior Election official said.
“They have been asked to play their part in ensuring the conduct of fair and free elections,” he added.
The students who will be on poll duty have already been issued Election Duty Certificates which will enable them to vote at their polling stations on the day of voting as has been arranged for all other government officials on poll duty.
