BJP Alleges 4,500 Voter Names Missing in PCMC Draft List for Indrayani Nagar-Balajinagar Ward

The BJP alleged that names of as many as 4,500 voters are missing from the electoral list of Indrayani Nagar-Balajinagar Ward 8 are missing after the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) published the draft voters list of 32 wards on Thursday.

”We have meticulously gone through the draft voters list. We found that names of 4,500 voters, who live in Indrayani Nagar-Balaji Nagar area, are missing,” said BJP leader and former corporator Seema Sawale.

”I suspect there is a huge conspiracy behind the deletion of names. These names have been deliberately deleted to ensure my defeat,” said Sawale—a former PCMC standing committee chairperson, who has been elected three times in a row from the same ward.

”It is impossible that the names of voters from other wards have also been deleted. I am in touch with some former corporators who have made similar complaints. We have noticed names of voters and societies from our ward have been deleted and put in some other wards,” said Sawale who has sent a complaint to the election department.

Sawale said the election department had said the voter count will be more or less the same in all wards and that the difference would not be more than 10 per cent. ”The biggest ward of Chikhli has 74,340 voters while Thergaon (Ward 23) has 34,756 voters. This is more than double the number, which shows the imbalance in the voter count. As many as six wards have more than 64,000 voters while five wards have more than 40,000 voters.”

Former NCP corporator Shyam Lande said that in his ward Sant Tukaram Nagar-Kasarwadi, several names are missing from the draft voters list. ”I will soon find out the exact count and send a complaint to the election department,” he said.

When contacted, Sachin Pawar, who heads the election department at the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation, said, “The draft voters list has been released. Voters can send in their objections by November 27. As for the complaint by Sawale, concerned officials will look into it.”

Manoj More has been working with the Indian Express since 1992. For the first 16 years, he worked on the desk, edited stories, made pages, wrote special stories and handled The Indian Express edition. In 31 years of his career, he has regularly written stories on a range of topics, primarily on civic issues like state of roads, choked drains, garbage problems, inadequate transport facilities and the like. He has also written aggressively on local gondaism. He has primarily written civic stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad, Khadki, Maval and some parts of Pune. He has also covered stories from Kolhapur, Satara, Solapur, Sangli, Ahmednagar and Latur. He has had maximum impact stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial city which he has covered extensively for the last three decades.

Manoj More has written over 20,000 stories. 10,000 of which are byline stories. Most of the stories pertain to civic issues and political ones. The biggest achievement of his career is getting a nearly two kilometre road done on Pune-Mumbai highway in Khadki in 2006. He wrote stories on the state of roads since 1997. In 10 years, nearly 200 two-wheeler riders had died in accidents due to the pathetic state of the road. The local cantonment board could not get the road redone as it lacked funds. The then PMC commissioner Pravin Pardeshi took the initiative, went out of his way and made the Khadki road by spending Rs 23 crore from JNNURM Funds. In the next 10 years after the road was made by the PMC, less than 10 citizens had died, effectively saving more than 100 lives.

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