Nellore: MLC candidates express concern over sluggish voter enrollment

Nellore: MLC candidates are worried about enrolling teachers and graduates' in the East Rayalaseema segment as there have been hurdles at many places and the situation may affect their winning chances as the deadline ends on Monday.

Some educational institutions are not maintaining proper records and some others are managing with testimonials of persons not working in institutions where enrollment in private educational institutions has become a tricky affair.

Out of 20,000 applications submitted physically and lying with tahsildars for uploading into the Election Commission website, sources said only 10,000 have been finished giving a restless experience to the contestants. Candidates are expressing that uploading the applications became a Herculean job for the administration due to the low-speed servers of the State government.

"We are very much worried about whether the enrollment process will be completed by Monday or not. There is no extension of the deadline as being circulated on social media. The lethargy of the eligible graduates and teachers also added fuel to the fire. Candidates are not able to express their confidence," said an aide of a candidate.

Especially, the major problem is from private unaided educational institutions that fail to main proper records for the enrollment of teachers. They haven't been registering the names of the teachers on records since the onset of the Covid situation in the district.

Now, candidates are insisting on enrolling voters, but they are helpless since teachers should have completed three years of service officially. There are allegations that the District Education Officer has been shifted to the headquarters a couple of days ago for failing to support the enrollment.

There is a practice even in some private engineering colleges that they simply place testimonials of qualified personnel as teachers, and they work somewhere in Bengaluru or Chennai. These unqualified teachers not on records are not eligible for enrollment which has been haunting the candidates, according to sources.

Normally, Left parties contest from teachers' and graduates' constituencies and win the polls, but for the first time the ruling YSR congress is focusing on these MLC polls. Candidates are also trying their level best to enroll teachers and graduates as voters and get support. Further, the website is slow many times due to poor maintenance and the lack of speed is bothering the enrollment staff.

Further, around 1.90 lakh graduates and 8,000 teachers submitted applications for enrollment as voters in the East Rayalaseema constituency up to Friday.

There were 2,18,356 graduates and 20,121 teachers enrolled as voters in March 2017. Officials say even voters can visit https://ceoandhra.nic.in and select council constituency in the E-Registration part for registration.