Tamil Nadu Election Commissioner P. Seetharaman reviewed the progress of work for the coming local body elections and asked the district administration to be in a state of preparedness.
Addressing a meeting with Collector S. Natarajan, Superintendent of Police N. Manivannan and officials from Rural Development and Panchayat Raj and other departments here on Friday, he asked the officials concerned to prepare the list of officials to be involved in the election process and provide them necessary training.
The officials should coordinate with the police and prepare the list of sensitive polling stations in the district. They should ensure that adequate security was provided in all such polling booths for fair and free elections, an official release said.
The officials should also prepare the list of vehicles and other logistics required for the peaceful conduct of the elections, he said.
Pointing out that 2,099 polling stations would be established in urban and rural local bodies, he said the election officials should inspect all the polling booths and ensure that they had basic facilities such as drinking water, electricity, ramps for differently abled and public convenience.
For urban local bodies, where Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) would be used for polling, a total of 260 EVMs were kept ready. For polling in rural local bodies, where a voter would cast four votes, a total of 4,096 ballot boxes were kept ready, he said.
Collector said there were four Municipalities, seven Town Panchayats, 11 Panchayat Unions and 429 Panchayats in the district and the electors would elect 3,691 representatives in both rural and urban local bodies. A little more than 11 lakh voters were expected to exercise their franchise in the election, likely to be held in October.
Virudhunagar
Inclusion and deletion of names of voters in the voter list ahead of the local body elections would be taken up till the last date of filing nominations by candidates and it would be published as the second supplementary voter list, State Election Commissioner P. Seetharaman, said.
Chairing a review meeting with officials of Virudhunagar district over poll preparedness, Mr. Seetharaman said that the work of printing booth slips with photographs of voters would be taken up between September 27 and October 1.
Awareness programme on using electronic voting machines among the public and model voting exercises would be taken up for a week from Monday.
The State Election Commissioner said that a total of 4,362 ballot boxes would be used in rural areas and a total of 18,541 officials would be involved in the election works.
Virudhunagar Collector A. Sivagnanam, District Superintendent of Police M. Rajaraman, Chief Election Officer (Panchayats) Sampath, District Revenue Officer C. Muthukumaran, Sivakasi Sub-Collector Amarkushwaha, District Rural Development Agency Project Director Suresh, Personal Assistant to Collector (Local body elections) Sathish Babu took part in the meeting.
