Election Commission fails to implement Covid protocols at booths

Officials said it was hard to ensure social distancing and check if people were wearing masks when voters in districts started turning up by 6am

Voters violate physical distancing in Murshidabad.:  Alamgir Hossain

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Snehamoy Chakraborty, Alamgir Hossain  |  TT  |  Bolpur(Birbhum), Behrampore   |  30.04.21: 

The Election Commission largely failed to implement Covid protocols at hundreds of booths in the last phase of polls at 35 Assembly seats across four districts, mostly for lack of infrastructure and health workers.

Sources said Covid protocols were not followed in the booths mainly in the morning when a huge number of voters turned up to vote very early to avoid the blazing April sun.

Officials said it was hard to ensure social distancing and check if people were wearing masks when voters in districts started turning up by 6am.

“There is only one health worker giving sanitisers and also masks to voters without one. The number of masks provided by the Election Commission is one-fourth of the total voters. It also becomes tough to monitor 500 people at a time. If we ask voters to maintain physical distancing, the queue will go up to 5km,” said a Birbhum district official.

At a booth in Baruipur primary school, Bolpur Assembly segment, a group of women huddled close, with six not wearing masks. A woman without a mask simply said: “I forgot.”

A policeman at the booth said it was a Herculean task to make people listen to pleas of physical distancing.

At Sankoa Primary School in Murshidabad’s Nowda, around 400 women at the booth violated physical distancing and most wore no mask early in the morning. Nargis Begum, a middle-aged woman, said she came early as she was fasting because of Ramazan. “I had no idea that there would be such a crowd at 6am,” she said. On why she wasn’t wearing a mask, she said: “I sweat a lot.”

Such scenes at booths came when Bengal reported 17,403 fresh infections and 89 deaths in the past 24 hours.

Officials said they tried to follow Covid protocols strictly but voters had to be responsible too.