Migrant workers seek postal ballots to exercise franchise

EC yet to act on plea for postal ballots 

for migrant workers, say activists

C Shivakumar

Chennai:

As the state cast its franchise, migrant workers are ruing that they never got a chance to vote in this election.

Most of the migrant workers working at different sites in Chennai Metro Rail told Express that they want a mechanism so that they are able to cast their vote from the state where they have migrated for work.

“The election gives us a right to elect our candidate. We have become migrant workers because our state is not able to provide us with jobs,” says Jatin Das of Assam.

Das says as such the right to vote is important for migrant workers to decide which candidate should come to power. “We are poor so we come here in search of livelihood. We don’t have enough money to travel all the way to our state to cast our vote,” he says.

“The Election Commission should work out a mechanism so that the migrant worker is able to vote. I should be able to elect the representative from the constituency where I actually belong to, from the place where I work now,” he says.

All India Additional secretary of Nirman Mazdoor Panchayat Sangh Geetha Ramakrishnan says that Election Commission has been urged since 2000 to go in for postal ballots but till now no measure has been taken in this regard.

She says that there are three crore migrant workers in India of which in Tamil Nadu alone there would be around 10 lakh migrants . She says most of the migrant workers would seldom spend money just to cast their franchise. “It is the responsibility of the state to ensure that all its citizens get the right to cast their franchise as per the constitution,” she says.

Interestingly, many of the migrant workers are unaware of the politics in Tamil Nadu. Das feels Trinamool Congress is the ruling party in Tamil Nadu. “I thought the ruling leader is from Trinamool Congress,’ he says.

However, most of them feel election campaigns in Tamil Nadu is very peaceful when compared to Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Assam. Another metro rail worker from Assam Ritu Sutiya says polling in his state is quite different from Tamil Nadu. “There we get the papers and we vote. But here the candidates use loudspeakers and campaign,” he says in awe