One lakh Malda voters without EPIC

Subhro Maitra Malda March 5, 2009: If Election Commission insists on the mandatory Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) for the voters, Malda presents a pathetic figure regarding the EPIC coverage. More than one lakh voters are still there who don’t have the EPIC. In fact yesterday in a video conference district administration drew flak from the EC for this poor showing.
On the other hand the performance of neighbouring district South Dinajpur is excellent as already 98.76% of the voters have got the EPIC there. District Magistrate Ashok Banerjee said, “After the deadline of 10th March, we hope to cover almost all the voters leaving aside only 3384 voters out of total voters 860044, who have left their constituency.”
However, out of 143806 new voters of the Malda only 38109 voters were issued photo identity card so far. There is little chance of achieving the target within deadline. District Magistrate Sridhar Ghosh conceded, “It is really a poor performance on our part. We have to expedite the process as EC has made it imperative to have EPIC for casting votes.” While the process of taking photographs for EPIC is already on,an emergency meeting of the 15 Block Development Officers (BDO) was called today on this issue.
In the minority dominated blocks like Sujapur and Harishchandrapur less than 20% of the new voters were issued EPIC. For example out of 16739 new voters of Sujapur only 3284 were issued EPIC while at Harishchandrapur 2110 got EPIC out of 10799. Again in the tribal dominated Habibpur which also shares a large part of the Bangladesh border, only 2051 voters have EPIC out of 15073.
Ghosh observed that the trend of huge migration from these areas to the other states is mainly responsible for such a poor coverage. “Those who go to the other states as labourers have hardly turned up for their EPIC.” Even those who have included their names at electoral roll, hardly bother to have their photographs taken.

Meanwhile, for the first time in the state a training of the police personnel has begun at Malda today. Sub Divisional Officer Prakash Pal along with Assistant Returning Officer Subho Mukherjee held a training on the duty of police during election campaign.