Barring a few incidents at some places, polling in the 120 municipalities and nine municipal corporations of Telangana went off peacefully today.
Barring a few incidents at some places, polling in the 120 municipalities and nine municipal corporations of Telangana went off peacefully today.
The polling started at 7 am, and the voter turnout was in general low during the early hours, but soon picked up. According to the State Election Commission officials, the average polling percent was 67.46 by 3 pm. It could cross 80% by the end of the polling, they said.
In Dabeerpura, perhaps the ward with the lowest turnout, polling was only 22% by 3 pm.
Some sporadic clashes did take place. At a Gadwal polling station, policemen resorted to a lathi-charge to disperse Congress and MIM activists who got into a tussle. In the fight a Congress leader Shankar was injured and was shifted to a hospital.
In Yadagirigutta, polling started half-an-hour late in some polling stations due to a power cut, and the election staff sat on the floor to conduct the voting process in some other stations as there were no tables. At some polling stations, there were clashes among the activists of the Congress, the TRS, the AIMIM and the BJP.
There was plenty of technology on display, too. The election officials used a face recognition app for the first time in some 10 polling stations under the Kompally municipality. And officials monitored the voting process through web-casting in 2,406 polling stations, and videographed it in 2,072 polling stations.
Ministers V Srinivas Goud, Singireddy Niranjan Reddy and G Jagadish Reddy, along with their family members, cast their votes in their respective polling stations. TPCC Chief N Uttam Kumar Reddy, along with his wife Padmavathi, and CLP leader Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka too were among those who cast their votes.
Speaking to mediapersons later, Reddy and Vikramarka criticized the TRS leaders for distributing money to the voters violating the poll code. The police nabbed some people who were found distributing money at some polling stations, it is learnt.
The SEC had set up 6,188 polling stations in the municipalities and 1,773 in the municipal corporations. As many as 45,000 polling personnel and 50,000 policemen were deployed for election duty. There are 1,746 candidates for the corporation seats and 11,099 candidates for the municipality seats in the fray. Candidates were elected unopposed to one of 325 divisions in the nine municipal corporations and 80 of the 2,727 wards in the 120 municipalities.