With heat consuming hundreds of lives, including of officials involved in more than 6-week long Lok Sabha polls, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Rajiv Kumar admitted on Monday that the elections should not happen in the peak of summer and suggested to prepone the schedule by a month at least.
At a press conference held a day before the counting of votes, Kumar accepted that one of the “learning” of this election is to hold polls a month before the usual schedule followed at every parliamentary polls. This can be done if the duration of multiple phase-wise voting cannot be squeezed, Kumar was of the view.
Besides that, the CEC said the Election Commission of India (ECI) would keep in mind not to fix polling dates either on Friday or Monday for general elections because that gives long weekend gap for voters. He said that the Commission has already implemented that it in the last 10 to 12 Assembly elections.
“Elections should be held at least one month before usual schedule followed. It should not happen in this heat. This is one learning for us. This is a huge elections, involves deployment of large number of forces which requirement massive movement. So we cannot reduce time taken to complete elections but we can prepone it by a month,” he said admitting that this was one of three learnings from this LS polls. Among the other two, he pointed out, was being well prepared to address fake narrative peddled at the time of every elections.
Two Election Commissioners Gyanesh Kumar and SS Sandhu, Deputy Election Commissioners Ajay Bhadoo, RK Gupta, and MK Sahoo, and other senior officials were present at the press meet.
Holding of elections in seven phases from April 19 to June 1 had cast shadow on preparedness which lead to low voter turnout though the Commission had said that it factored this into the poll preparation.
Odisha alone recorded 99 heat-related deaths including of 20 persons who lost lives out of heat strokes, Satyabrata Sahu, the State’s special relief commissioner, said on Monday. Other than that, poll officials too died in the line of duty. For instance, in the last phase, at least 18 officials manning polling stations died of heat-related complications.
When asked whether poll officials loosing lives in the line of duty are entitled to any compensation, a Deputy Election Commissioner told businessline that there is a provision to give ₹15 lakh ex-gratia per person.
Sharing “incredible stories”, the CEC patted on the Commission’s back for successfully holding world’s biggest elections peacefully that saw deployment of 1.5 crore security forces and with significantly less repoll, 39 in 2024 elections, in comparison to 540 in 2019.
To back that, the ECI showed slides of achievements that covered world records in different verticals. In this elections, 1.5 million were registered voters which the ECI stated was 2.5 times more than total voters put together in 27 countries of European Union (EU).
Likewise, 312 million were registered women voters, which is 1.25 times more than total women voters of 27 EU countries. Kumar along with other Commission officials expressed gratitude to women voters for participating in huge numbers in the democratic exercise. He said that the Commission enforced rules to ensure that no politician makes undignified remarks against women and, if they did, the ECI punished them.
The Commission appreciated highest voter turnout of 58.58 per cent in Jammu and Kashmir in the last four decades. He also talked about the ECI’s handling of “4Ms” of Muscle power, money power, misinformation and Model Code of Conduct violations.
He stated that ₹10,000 crore in cash and other inducements were seized during the elections, while it was ₹3,475 crore in 2019. No major incidents of distribution of freebies, liquor and money was noticed, the ECI informed.
