Tirupati: Political parties gear up for local body polls

Tirupati: While state government has initiated the process for conducting local body elections in the first quarter of 2020, district Panchayat Raj department also gearing up with preparatory works. They have already prepared voters lists and identified polling stations. Officials say that there are 1,372 panchayats in the district with 13,240 wards. Accordingly, 13,240 polling stations are to be set up to facilitate 24.42 lakh rural voters to exercise their franchise. Voters have to elect 901 MPTC and 65 ZPTC members.

Meanwhile, local body elections have become prestigious for political parties as they will reveal the pulse of rural voters. In the Assembly and Parliamentary elections held in April this year, TDP has won only one Assembly seat out of 14 and lost all three Parliamentary constituencies in the district.

TDP wants to bounce back in the local body elections. A senior leader of the party said that already people started realising the mistake by voting in favour of YSRCP in the general elections. The Party Supremo Naidu stayed for three days in the district in November first week and hold hectic parleys with party leaders from each mandal in each constituency.

Following this, the party organisational elections were started. So far, more than 1,100 committee elections were completed out of 1,400 plus committees.

Janasena also focussed on the local body elections and its Chief Pawan Kalyan has stayed for five days in the district and held extensive meetings with cadre. They are in the process of electing party committees at various levels. Pawan also appointed a three-member committee to strengthen the party from grassroots.

BJP has organised 150-km padayatra that covered seven constituencies. The ruling party was confident of repeating their grand performance in the local body polls too and saying that various schemes being implemented to benefit all sections of the society will fetch them good results.