Achi news desk-
15 hours ago
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N. Raghuraman, Managing Guru
As I boarded a rickshaw from my home to the Mumbai airport early on Friday, I asked the 27-year-old auto driver what his origins were. He said, ‘Bihar’. When I asked if he would go to his hometown to vote for the 18th Lok Sabha elections, he said, ‘No’, and argued that ‘Many people from my state will miss out on voting because we have not been able to get our a voter. cards made.
A few years ago we came to Mumbai to earn money for our family. This time also we will not be able to go due to the summer rush, lack of cheap means of travel and the compulsion of not being able to leave our daily wages. More than half of the world’s people (4.2 billion) live in countries where elections are being held this year. Almost 2 billion people in more than 70 countries, from India to Indonesia and from Britain to America, will go to vote in the elections.
The world’s biggest electoral process has started in India too, but if statistics are to be believed, many 18 and 19 year olds will not be able to be part of it. According to data released by the Election Commission two weeks ago, the number of voters in the age group of 18 and 19 who have registered to vote is 1.8 crore (this number may have increased slightly, but not much). This is only a third of their estimated population of 49 million.
Statistics show that barely 38% of these are voting for the first time and they seem to have little interest in what their future holds. Does this really make them irresponsible? I don’t think so. I was also eligible to vote in the 7th Lok Sabha elections held in 1980. I had moved to Bombay (now Bombay) and was living as a paying guest with no permanent address. Because of my father’s railway job – which involved frequent transfers – our ration card was always in transit mode. Due to these reasons I could not produce my voter card.
Therefore, we could not vote in the 8th, 9th and 10th Lok Sabha elections held in 1984, 1989 and 1991, when the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 years. At that time, young people my age were looking for a good job to complete their education or to provide financial support to their family. If you look at these small workers in states like UP and Bihar, many of them cannot leave even a day’s work.
No wonder, in Bihar, which has the youngest population in the country, only 9.3 lakh out of a possible 54 lakh (17%) of such voters have been able to register. UP, another young state, has been able to register only 23%. Our country’s capital is no better than this, where politics is a daily staple. Only 1.5 lakh out of 7.2 lakh (21%) are registered in Delhi and even in rich states like Maharashtra this figure is only 27%.
I understand that poor daily wage laborers and students who study in remote places to prepare for competitive exams are not irresponsible, rather they are hard workers who work up to 16 hours a day to overcome the financial crisis of their families . However, they would have become more responsible if they themselves had added their names to the voter list.
The bottom line is that Our next generation is not responsible enough to shoulder the responsibility of the family. It’s not their job, it’s our job – that is, the parents or the government – to make them eligible to vote with the help of technology.
