Gandhinagar: Polling in nearly 9,000 gram panchayats of 33 districts in Gujarat is being held today amid tight security and deployment of over around 2 lakh poll and police personnel.

The voting began at 8 am today and will continue till 5 pm. Counting of votes of the local body polls, which is not held on party basis ie the candidates don;t belong to any party, will be done on December 29. The voting during first 4 hours was by and large peaceful with reports of protests from a few places owing to various reasons. The polling in Dethal village under Lakhani of Banaskantha district in North Gujarat was stopped owing to complaints of printing of wrong symbol in front of a sarpanch candidate. The poll there is likely to be postponed.

Meanwhile, long queues were seen at many places and on an average 20 to 30 % of polling has been reported in the first four hours, however at some places the percentage was as high as 45 to 50 %.

The polls though taking place after demonetization won’t be able to give any clear indication about villagers view on government;s move as the elections are not being held on party basis.

Around 1 lakh 40 thousand poll personnel and over 50 thousand police personnel have been deployed for the election being held on total 22,382 booths set up for the polling of which 9,575 have been identified as sensitive or hypersensitive, Secretary of the State Election Commission Mahesh Joshi said.

Mr Joshi said that a total 10,279 gram panchayat were scheduled to go for elections. However, 1,325 of them were declared Samras by the Panchayats department where all the ward members and Sarpanches are declared elected uncontested under the Samras scheme. After this, 8,954 gram panchayats are going for polls today. Apart from this, in 483 villages Sarpanchs and 27,183 ward members have also been elected uncontested. Polling for the by-election of various wards and Sarpanches of 39 gram panchayats are also being held today.

Total 53116 wards are witnessing polling to seal the fate of 1,20,936 contestants while for the total 8527 posts of Sarpanch, 26813 contestants are in the fray. In 66 villages, nobody has filed nomination for Sarpanch and in 3,057 wards of different gram panchayats, nobody chose to contest the election.

During the election, the total number of voters is around 1.65 crore of which 79.63 lakh are female. Ballot papers are being used for the polls for which 22,382 polling booths have been set up using 44,158 ballot boxes.

DeshGujarat