MP’s Chhatarpur takes initiatives to bring back domestic migrants to exercise their franchise

BHOPAL: In an attempt to increase turnout, the Chhatarpur district administration of the migrant-hit Bundelkhand region of Madhya Pradesh has taken several initiatives to bring back the domestic diaspora to exercise their franchise.

Chhatarpur is one of the migrant-hit districts in the backward Bundelkhand region. A huge number of people migrate to search for work for their livelihood from

the district to metro cities every year and return in the festive seasons. Currently, around 31,690 voters from the district have gone to work in metro cities.

“Keeping in mind the number of migrant voters, we have taken several initiatives to bring them back to their home district so that they can celebrate the festival of democracy by exercising their franchise,” District Election Officer (DEO)

and collector of Chhatarpur Sandeep GR told Millennium Post.

Under the SVEEP (Systematic Voter’s Education and Electoral Participation) activities, the district administration has been making several efforts to persuade migrant voters to come back to their villages and towns so that the district would witness a record turnout in the November 17 Assembly elections.

“Our teams that formed to ensure to bring back migrant voters first collected their phone numbers and a call centre has been set up specially for this to phone and convince them to cast votes,” the DEO said.

The collector also said that apart from these, we have also sent our SVEEP teams to those cities where domestic migrants have been working for a livelihood, to coax them to come back to their villages to cast their votes, the team members have invited them by tying a thread on their wrists for reminding them to caste vote.

The collector, Sandeep GR himself contacted the migrants over a phone call. He phoned a migrant, Nandu Chidar resident of Sarkhana

village of Chhatarpur district who is working in Delhi and urged him to come back to the village with his compeers to exercise his franchise.

Nandu has ensured the collector to go back to the village with his associates and to cast the vote.

“A total of 8,430 migrant voters have been phoned to appeal to them to exercise their franchise, besides, 1,744 postcards have been sent to domestic diaspora who have

gone to metros to search for livelihood,” CEO Zila Panchayat Tapasya Parihar, who also handle the SVEEP activities, told Millennium Post.

The district administration has contacted the migrant voters through various ways in

Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Jaipur, Ghaziabad, Bhilwara, Surat, Ahmedabad, Pune, Jammu, Dehradun,

Nagpur, Mumbai, Kanpur, Chandigarh and Mathura cities where they have gone for

work.

In addition to them, the district administration is running several activities to increase turnout in the polls under the SVEEP. The Chhatarpur district has more than 14 Lakh

electors spread across six Assembly constituencies, Chhatarpur, Maharajpur, Chandla, Rajnagar, Bijabar

and Malhara. The district recorded 67.45 per cent turnout in the previous Assembly

polls.

The polls for the 230-member Assembly will be held on November 17 in the state in a single phase and the counting of the votes will be conducted on December 3.