Chandigarh,
02 October, 2019
Civil Administration and Police Authorities in Haryana after a detailed joint exercise have identified 83 polling stations in 60 locations as ‘critical’ and 2,923 polling stations in 1,419 locations as ‘vulnerable’ for the forthcoming General Election to State Legislative Assembly, polling for which is to be held on October 21.
While giving this information here on Wednesday, Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order), Navdeep Singh Virk said that elaborate security arrangements for peaceful and incident-free polling are being made, including the identification of critical and vulnerable polling stations across the state, which is a very important exercise in this regard.
“All such polling stations would be covered by either deployment of Central Paramilitary Forces, Micro Observers, Webcasting etc or a combination of these”, he added.
Sharing the official figures of critical polling stations, Virk said that district Kurukshetra has maximum 14 polling booth followed by 10 each in Hisar and Palwal, 7 each in Mewat, Hansi, Sirsa and Panipat, 5 each in Jind and Bhiwani, 3 each in Yamunanagar and Dadri, 2 in Mahendergarh and 1 each in Gurugram and Kaithal.
Similarly, regarding vulnerable polling stations district Mewat has maximum 342 followed by Gurugram, Sirsa and Jhajjar with the figure of 308, 292 and 254 respectively. Other polling stations indentified as vulnerable include 199 in Faridabad, 143 in Panipat, 142 in Ambala, 141 each in Rohtak and Fatehabad, 119 in Kurukshetra, 98 in Panchkula, 78 in Yamunanagar, 29 in kaithal, 24 in Karnal, 64 in Sonipat, 29 in Jind, 49 in Hisar, 46 in Hansi, 85 in Bhiwani, 91 in Dadri, 107 in Mahendergarh, 60 in Rewari and 82 in Palwal.
Haryana has a total of about 19,500 polling stations in 10,309 locations.
Virk also explained that as per Election Commission of India guidelines, a booth which has witnessed 90 per cent of voting and where more than 75 per cent of polling recorded in favour of a single candidate, in the past general election, such polling station is put in the category of critical polling stations.
A vulnerable polling station or area is where the voters were either intimidated or influenced to vote using unlawful means in the past elections or there is a potential of the same in the forthcoming election. After this vulnerability mapping the District authorities are required to take follow up action both prior to the polls and even on the polling day to ensure free and fair polls in the vulnérables areas or polling stations.