Election Monday as Voting on 4 Lok Sabha seats, 65.87 lakh voters to decide future of 61 candidates

Ranchi: Voting will be held on four Lok Sabha seats of the state Koderma, Ranchi, Khunti (ST) and Hazaribagh on Monday during which a total of 65,87,028 voters will decide the political future of 61 candidates. Constituency wise in Koderma there are 14 candidates, 20 in Ranchi, 11 in Khunti and 16 in Hazaribagh. People, since 7 am, will line up across 8834 polling booths spread across these four constituencies to cast their votes out of which 3742 booths have been declared sensitive and another 2440 booths have been declared very sensitive.

In Koderma the total number of eligible voters is 18,12,085 who will cast their votes on 2475 polling booths while in Ranchi 19,10,955 voters will exercise their franchise on 2376 polling booths. Similarly, in Khunti 11,99, 512 voters will cast their votes on 1705 polling booth while on Hazaribagh the 16,64,476 people will turn up at 2278 votes to elect the candidate of their choice.

In wake of the elections in these four constituencies, elaborate security arrangements have been also made as according to the figures of the state police headquarters 40,000 security personnel including those belonging to the central paramilitary forces and state police personnel have been deployed on poll duty to ensure free and incident free elections. In many booths which fall under the LWE areas members of the polling party have been taken to their booths through helicopters. 

The prominent candidates who are in the race for these three seats included Rajkumar Yadav of the CPI(ML), Babulal Marandi of JVM(P) and Annapurna Devi of BJP in Koderma, Sanjay Seth of the BJP and Subodhkant Sahai of the Congress in Ranchi, Arjun Munda of the BJP and Kalicharan Munda of the Congress in Khunti and Jayant Sinha of BJP, Gopal Sahu of Congress and Bhuneshwar Prasad Mehta of CPI in Hazaribagh.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself campaigned for the BJP during this phase along with other star campaigners of the party including Piyush Goyal, Hema Malini and Chief Minister Raghubar Das while Congress president Rahul Gandhi along with JMM’s acting president Hemant Soren also campaigned for the Mahagathbandhan and so did Shatrughan Sinha.