Flying squads, patrol teams for security

Elaborate arrangements, including law-and-order preparations, are in place to ensure a free and fair local body election in the district on Monday.

As the district is under spotlight for its history of volatile political rivalry, extra law-and-order arrangements are under way to make the election incident-free. In addition to 9,000 police personnel being deployed here, four companies of the Karnataka Police are being despatched to assist the local police. The law-and-order arrangements include 135 police flying squads and 68 law-and-order patrolling teams.

“If any law-and-order problem is reported in a polling booth, the patrolling team will reach there in 15 to 20 minutes,” District Collector and District Election Officer P. Bala Kiran said. A control room had been opened at the Collectorate, he said adding presiding officers in polling booths were instructed to contact the officers manning them to report incidents, if any.

Of the total 2,434 polling booths in the district, 1,186 booths have been identified as sensitive. Barricading would be arranged in 137 hyper-sensitive booths.

Mr. Kiran said that all arrangements had been made for the live webcasting of 408 sensitive polling booths. In addition to webcasting, manual videography would be done in 553 booths, including 184 booths where videography was arranged on request from candidates on payment of Rs.4,000 in each booth, he informed. He said that he had so far received nearly 1,200 complaints from candidates. As many as 120 candidates secured the High Court’s order directing the election officials free and fair election, he said.

Webcasting

District Informatics Officer Andrews Varghese, who is heading the webcasting control room at the Collectorate, said that arrangements had been made for complaints-free webcasting.

Ten vehicles, each having technical personnel and a police person, would be attending to 40 polling booths, if any technical snags were reported. The controlling room would have 20 monitors covering 20 booths each, he said. Higher officials of the BSNL, KSEB and the Akshaya Mission form part of the monitoring system, he added.

BSNL Deputy General Manager T.S. Vishwanathan, who is in charge of connectivity required for the webcasting, said that 50 Mbps fibre bandwidth was being tested for the webcasting.

The bandwidth would be raised to 100 Mbps if required, he said.

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