Jalpaiguri tops voter turnout in Phase 2

TNN, 20 April 2019, Kolkata: The West Bengal Lok Sabha constituencies of Darjeeling, Raiganj and Jalpaiguri threw up an interesting phenomenon during polling on Thursday. In all three, a significant number of voters actually cast their votes after 5pm, leading to a spurt in the polling percentage. 

There can be two reasons for this. In rural booths, voters may have decided to come out only after temperatures dipped while in urban areas, they attended to jobs before turning up to vote.

According to the Election Commission (EC), Jalpaiguri constituency in north Bengal registered the highest voting percentage among the 97 seats that went to polls in the second phase on Thursday. While Jalpaiguri registered 86.44%, only four other constituencies across the country – Mangoldoi (83.60%) and Nowgong (81.08%) in Assam, Mandya (80.23%) in Karnataka, and Dharmapura (80.49%) in Tamil Nadu – crossed the 80% mark.

According to the state CEO’s office, the polling percentage in Jalpaiguri till 5pm was 82.76%. The final tally published by EC through its app Suvidha was 86.44%. A greater percentage of people appeared to have cast their votes after 5pm in Darjeeling and Raiganj. In Darjeeling, the voting percentage till 5pm was 72.14%, and rose to 78.60% in the final tally. In Raiganj, the percentage rose from 73.31% to 79.61%.

So far as the overall polling percentage for the second phase was concerned, Bengal outmatched all the other states. While the national average in the second phase was a mere 69.08%, Bengal recorded a whopping polling percentage of 81.72%. What is interesting is that only smaller states registered a polling percentage that came even close to Bengal. This means that the larger states registered a far lower percentage than the national average of 69.08%.

The three states that came close to Bengal were Manipur (81.09%), Assam (78.74%) and Puducherry (78.47%). The turnout in Jammu and Kashmir was the lowest at 45.65 %.

Jalpaiguri also witnessed a larger turnout than in 2014. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Jalpaiguri had clocked 85.17%. Darjeeling and Raiganj, however, failed this time to reach the 2014 mark. While Darjeeling had polled 79.51% votes in 2014 as compared to 78.60% this year, the percentage in Raiganj came down slightly from 79.89% to 79.61% this time around.