NIZAMABAD: With 2019 polls round the corner, all political parties have intensified preparations for election to strengthen their respective party’s base at grassroots level in all the Assembly constituencies. As part of this, they have started concentrating on strengthening polling booth committees.
This polling booth level concept was first popularised by BJP in Gujarat, which achieved expected results. Now, all political parties including Congress and TRS are emulating the saffron party’s strategy in all constituencies, across the State.
According to BJP leaders, every Assembly constituency has about 300 polling booths. The party formed polling booth committee with ten members in each polling booth level. Further, BJP’s youth wing, BJYM, is organising programmes to attract youth. . Every polling booth has voters’ list which spreads up to 10 pages. The BJP also decided to appoint page incharges for electoral rolls. In this way, BJP is preparing its cadre for the next elections.
“Party cadres are continuing good work at every polling booth level. In some areas, we want to motivate the cadres to speed up programmes,” BJYM state general secretary B Srikanth Reddy told Express. Senior Congress leader and former minister P Sudarshan Reddy is implementing the same programme in Bodhan Assembly constituency. “We are selecting 50 party activists from each polling booth. They will be in touch with voters till the election process is completed,’’ Nizamabad District Congress Committee (DCC) president Taher Bin Hamdan said. He directed all the Assembly constituency in charges to implement the same programme.
Likewise, recently TRS MLAs too started strengthening their party network at polling booth level by organising interaction with people and explaining to them about development activities undertaken by the State government in the past four years.
TRS MLAs are constituting polling booth level committees as per their convenience. They are identifying beneficiaries of the government schemes, employees, and retired employees and Telangana activists.
Party activists are regularly in touch with these sections of voters to seek their cooperation for party in the ensuing elections. “We want to encourage word-of-mouth publicity about the government’s success at grassroots level which will give expected results in the coming elections’’ one of the TRS leaders said.
Millennium voters
The Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) has also decided to undertake a campaign for teenagers, who were born in 2000, to make them enrol themselves in the voters list in the run-up to the 2019 polls. They are being called as millennium voters