All-women team to count votes in Bhavnagar

The counting centre for the four wards is Government Engineering College located in Vidyanagar area of Bhavnagar. The women will do start-to-end job, including bringing EVMs from strong rooms to counting rooms, unlocking the EVMs, computer data entry, counting of votes, compilation and tacking back the machines to the strong room again. Even peons and medical staff will be female, said Bhavnagar district collector Banchhanidhi Pani.

The collector, who is also district election officer of Bhavnagar, said that since the RO and assistant returning officer (ARO) Trupti Vyas were women and the civic body elections also had 50 per cent seats reserved for women, he proposed to the RO to have a team of female staff for counting as well. “During interaction with female staff at election training, when I asked them if they would like to be part of vote counting team as well, they happily agreed. They said that they had never been entrusted with such a job. I asked the RO if she will be okay with the proposal and she agreed. Therefore, we have selected these women to do the counting of vote and give them chance to this very sensitive and responsible job,” said Pani.

The collector further says that this will be for the first time in the state that an all-women team will be counting votes of any election. To prevent any hiccups in the counting process, the women who will be counting votes have been selected from engineering fields and who are tech-savvy. “We have selected female engineers from PGVCL (Paschim Gujarat Vij Company Limited), revenue department and teachers who know technology and handle such job,” the collector added.