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To prepare for upcoming national elections in 2024, Pune city administration is in full swing to register voters, especially youth and marginalised communities such as those with disabilities, sex workers, trans people, and those from scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and nomadic tribes, among others.
Deputy collector, Minal Kalsekar, said, “25 teams of the social welfare department will ensure voter registration so we live up to our motto – ‘No voter to be left behind’. We have also tried registering as many as possible floating populations like that of sugarcane cutters. We have reached out to the homeless, those living on roadsides, under the bridges and so on.
By December 9, as many as 1,871 voter application forms from SC and ST communities were collected. 524 applications came from nomadic tribes, and 282 from particularly vulnerable tribal groups (PVTG). A total of 135 sex workers, 112 transgender people and 998 people with disabilities also signed up.
“We have taken up social media campaigns in a big way. Due to lack of awareness or even apprehension in registering as voters among some groups, we have appointed community members as our brand ambassadors to enhance outreach,” she said. The administration has also tied up with NGOs and grassroot-level civic groups to organise campaigns encouraging people to register as voters and hold registration camps.
Final additions and deletions in the voters list will be made by the administration by December 26, and the final
list of voters will be published on January 3, Kalsekar said.
The population of 18-19 year olds, which earlier was 26,588 as of the list published on October 27, is now 45,040 as of December 9. There were almost 30,000 new registrations in the age group 20-29 taking the number of these voters up to 12,68,854.
Speaking about youth registration, Kalsekar added, “We tied up with colleges and consistently held drives in institutes. We realised that the response increases manifold when we train a few students from each college on how to register. They then go back and conduct registration for their peers.”
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