‘Woke up at 3 am because I was so excited’: Delhi school students volunteer at polling stations during Assembly elections

“Our school sent us, and we will be getting Rs 800 for volunteering today. Three days ago, we trained at Kamla Nehru College. We have to help the elderly and differently abled people. We offer them wheelchairs and also help them cast their vote,” explained Puneet whose father works at a cake-making factory in Haryana.

At Satya Public School in Devli village, Satish Kuhi, 17, and Suraj Patel, 15, carefully matched names on voter IDs with those on the voting slips carried by people in a long queue. They also helped the elderly and differently abled electors.

They were also told to check the voter slips, ensure that people were not carrying their phones inside the booth and provide wheelchair service to the elderly.

The duo from a government school in Malviya Nagar said they were not provided any training beforehand. Even before they started the day’s tasks, they had to face a challenge. “There was some confusion about which school we had to go to. We were first asked to go to one polling booth and then to another. It took an hour before we were able to figure out that this was the school we had to come to. We have been standing here since morning,” said Satish.

Student volunteers Dev and Tushar said that EC officials gave them a lowdown of the entire process at the booth. (Express Photo)

For Dev, 17, a student of Govt Boys Senior Secondary School No 2, Roop Nagar, it was an opportunity to learn a key democratic practice. Keen to cast his vote as soon he becomes eligible, he asserted, “We have become a part of a process that selects the government of a state and there is nothing more exciting than this.”

He was deployed at a booth near Kingsway Camp. His schoolmate Tushar Jain, 15, asserted that “the Election Commission officials made us understand the entire voting process and we understood how a ballot is cast.”

It was a learning experience for student volunteer Yogesh too. “We even learned to communicate our names in sign language,” he said.

Jiya (17), Kashish (15), and Vanshika (15) from Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya volunteered at a polling booth in Pitampura Village. The girls said that they opted to volunteer to serve the people.

While Jiya aspires to become a journalist by pursuing mass communication, Kashish and Vanshika said they will opt for humanities at Delhi University. Jiya said she wanted to understand the process of election which is why she took up the role. According to Vanshika, her mother was also participating in the volunteering work which made her opt for it too.

The school students were among the 8,715 volunteers deployed by the Election Commission across 13,766 polling stations in 2,696 locations across Delhi. These volunteers were appointed to ensure a seamless voting experience — providing wheelchairs and support to the elderly and specially-abled voters.