Several employees, who have been commissioned for election duty in the city, have not got their postal ballots yet. This is despite GHMC’s claim that the ballots have been despatched to whoever has applied for those.
A total of 25,000 employees from various departments in the city and surrounding districts have been asked to join polling duty in the city.
While it is customary to deploy teaching staff from colleges and schools for election duty, this time round, employees have been drawn from many other departments, too, owing to staff shortage. “Initially kept under reserve, we all started receiving messages after 11 p.m. on Wednesday, asking us to join duties. This is the first time we are on polling duty, and have not received our postal ballots yet,” says Srivalli from the Food Corporation of India, deputed to Karwan constituency.
Similar is the complaint of Shabana Sultana, a government teacher with vote in Khairatabad and deployed in Yakutpura constituency.
The process of applying for postal ballot is tedious. It requires the heads of the respective departments to prepare a list of the employees on election duty, and submit to the district election officers under whom the employees would discharge their duties.
They would be issued application forms or Form-12, which need to be filled and returned along with identity and address proof. The required number of ballots would then be sent to the respective returning officers whose duty it is to ensure delivery to the employee. This time, forms have been distributed and collected at constituency-wise training camps conducted in the city.
The district election office at GHMC has reportedly received 16,000 applications for postal ballot, of which 5,200 were from city-based employees. They all have been sent the postal ballots, while for the remaining staff who are from outside the city, the ballots have been despatched to the returning officers concerned, they say.
Missing ballots
Meanwhile, G. Harshavardhan Reddy, official spokesperson for the Congress party, claims that more than 20,000-22000 postal ballots have gone missing across the state, and attributes it to the carelessness of district election officers. “District collectors, who are DEOs, are counter-accusing employees of not submitting applications. My question is, whether they cared enough to issue acknowledgement slips to employees from whom they have collected application forms during training camps,” Mr. Reddy says.
He has submitted a representation to Chief Electoral Officer Rajat Kumar urging him to address the issue, with the latter assuring that all employees would be given the ballots. However, given that the postal ballots need to be counted first, before the counting of direct ballot begins, it cannot be assured that they would reach in time.
