Nizamabad: District officials busy in arrangements for civic polls

Nizamabad: District officials and staff are busy with the pre-arrangements after the State Election Commission (SEC) issued election schedule for municipalities and municipal corporations. The SEC made it mandatory to prepare voters list both ward-wise and caste-wise. The elections will be held from January 22. District Collectors C Narayana Reddy (Nizamabad) and N Satyanarayana (Kamareddy) were already busy in appointing district officials as special officers to oversee the implementation of code of conduct in the municipalities of both the districts.

Voters' lists will be prepared for the municipal elections by standardising the same voter lists during the general election. The voters list, which was set up polling station-wise during Lok Sabha elections, will not be arranged ward-wise. Instead of taking up this work manually, which delays the process, the SEC had developed an online app – T-Poll App. Ward-wise list could be generated if the T-Poll app includes the boundaries of wards in the respective municipalities. However, voter lists are not available on the app. But this does not mean that the process is not progressing in other areas. The app is basically designed according to the manually available voter lists. The problem was brought to the notice of the SEC Commissioner. All the political parties are watching closely as how voters' details, both division and ward wise, will be available by Friday evening. Caste enumeration is crucial for reservation in municipalities and wards. The SEC has directed the Municipal Commissioners to identify BC, SC, ST and women divisions in wards and to prepare lists by January 4, 2020. This exercise was already done in July and caste and gender wise voters' identifications was over. The details were already with the authorities. But the process was revived with the re-division of wards and the problem is that the listings are not available online. The staff are visiting each house and checking with the old lists.

The district officials said the deadline is too short to complete the process of voters listing as they have to check the list, take up objections, make corrections and finally release the final list of voters.

The State Election Commission will hold a video conference with the District Collectors on Friday (December 27) to review the election arrangements. The SEC will issue orders to maintain caste enumeration without errors and also will guide on matters such as resolving objections. It came to know that new guidelines will be released to arrange inspection and static teams to ensure strict implementation of code of conduct. The appointment of Returning and Assistant Returning Officers for ward-wise elections is almost complete. In the erstwhile Nizamabad district, there are Nizamabad Corporation and Kamareddy and five other municipalities. District and division-level officials were appointed as returning officers (ROs) and teachers with experience in the selection process were selected as assistant returning officers (AROs).

The RO and ARO will oversee the receipt of nominations, scrutiny, withdrawal of candidates, finalisation of the final lists of candidates and supervising the polls. In small municipalities, only one team is working in two wards. Here division-level officers are selected as ROs.