Outstation students in Pune lament missing out on voting in Lok Sabha elections 2024

Niyali is a social media intern at the Systematic Voters Education and Electoral Participation (SVEEP) department of the collector’s office in Pune. Her main responsibility is to spread awareness about the importance of casting votes, primarily among the young population who are avid Instagram users. She has been working on various strategies to encourage and motivate young people to register and cast their votes. She has been creating reels on Instagram to help spread the message and make the process more accessible and exciting for the youth.

Unfortunately, she could not return to her hometown in Chhattisgarh on May 7 to cast her vote due to high-priced flight tickets and not enough leaves. “I was excited to use my right to vote as it was my first time, but being a student, how could I spend 15,000-20,000 for air tickets to my hometown?” she asked.

She did not even try to ask the office for the holidays because she was already discouraged by the prices. “As an intern for just two months, you do not want to take more than one or two days of leave,” she added.

Across the city, many students and interns like Niyali who come from faraway places could not return to their hometowns to vote due to similar circumstances.

Some students could not return to their cities or towns because of the different voting dates. Ankesh, a 21-year-old media student specialising in public relations, said, “I didn’t get leave as the voting date of Pune, where I’m interning, is April 13, so we will be getting leave on that day. While mine was in Raipur on May 7.”

Though some private institutes even held their mid-term examinations on a day that did not clash with the voting day in Pune, several outstation students missed the voting date back home.

First-time voter Mannat, a student at one such institute, said that she was unable to go back to her native Assam to vote. Voting day for her hometown was April 18, but she had a college midterm exam on the same day. She said, “This would have been my first chance to be able to vote and play a role in making a possible change in the current governmental landscape of the country.”

According to her, the college authorities were aware of the conflict in dates but chose to ignore it. She claimed that certain private institutes in Pune had scheduled their mid-term exams in such a way that outstation students missed their voting dates. Interestingly, the exams did not clash with the voting day in Pune.