Life comes to a stand still as shops remain closed on poll day

SNS, Siliguri, 17 April 2014: Polling was unusually brisk and peaceful today in Siliguri, which falls under both the Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri Lok Sabha constituencies. The election commission had made elaborate arrangements to ensure smooth elections and in almost none of the polling stations people had to stand in long queues to wait for their turn to cast votes. However, a vast majority of businesspersons in Siliguri, which is the business hub of north Bengal, kept their shops and business establishments shut during Election Day on the pretext of casting votes, causing immense inconvenience to residents in the town.

Tarun Nashkar, a resident of Hakimpara, who had to run from one shop to the other for over an hour in search of an emergency drug for his father this morning, said almost all the medicine shops in their locality were closed and the drug was not available in the medicine outlet of a private nursing home in their area. “Around 10 a.m. today, my father suddenly fell seriously ill. The doctor prescribed him an emergency drug. I had to travel almost six kilometers through the large crowds of voters in front of polling booths and party workers at various places in the town due to the elections to get the drug as the medicine shops in our locality as well as the wholesale market in nearby Khudirampally were all closed and the medicine was not available at the outlet of a private nursing home on the Rishi Aurobinda Road, which was open. It took me over an hour to get the medicine. My father would have collapsed had I reached home a few minutes later,” he said. Nearly 600 medicine shops dot Siliguri and its surrounding areas but most of them remained closed today. Only a few medicine shops near the Siliguri hospital and drug outlets of some nursing homes remained open throughout the day. This caused immense inconvenience to relatives of patients, especially in emergency cases like accidents or when a patient’s condition was critical.

The town wore a deserted look as not only shops, business establishments, educational institutions and government as well as private offices remained closed but also buses, vans, auto rickshaws and cycle rickshaws remained off the roads, and even shopping malls, petrol pumps, garages, stores dealing in necessary commodities and offices of essential services such as the biggest internet service providers of the Siliguri sub-division, the SINET, were shut. The owners of many shops and business establishments said they were compelled to keep their establishments closed today as most of their staff members were on leave. They said vans and cycle rickshaws were off the roads as their pullers, who mostly belong to the neigbouring districts, had gone to their native constituencies to cast their votes.