180mn to vote for 117 seats today

New Delhi: The second biggest phase of the staggered electoral fight to govern India will play out on Thursday, giving more than 180 million voters the right to have their say across 117 Lok Sabha seats. Polling will be held for 39 seats in Tamil Nadu, 19 in Maharashtra, 12 in Uttar Pradesh, 10 in Madhya Pradesh, seven each in Bihar and Chhattisgarh, six each in Assam and West Bengal, five in Rajasthan, four in Jharkhand, one in Jammu and Kashmir and one in Puducherry.

On Tuesday, leaders made last ditch efforts to woo voters in favour of their party candidates. Electoral authorities in Tamil Nadu have made arrangements to ensure trouble free voting by 5.50 crore eligible voters in about 61000 polling stations in the state. Polling will begin at 7 a.m. and close at 6 p.m. About 1.47 lakh police personnel would be on security duty in the state, said police officials. In all, 845 candidates, including 55 women aspirants are in the poll fray, and prominent among them, are former union ministers Dayanidhi Maran, A Raja, TR Baalu, S Jagatrakshakan and TKS Elangovan from the DMK, former union minister Mani Shankar Iyer of the Congress, PMK leader Anbumani Ramadoss and his NDA ally M Vaiko of MDMK. Chennai South will have the highest number of 42 candidates.

In Uttar Pradesh, Mathura, is emerging as one of the key constituencies going to the polls on April 24. Around 16,50,000 voters will decide the fate of twelve candidates who are in the fray, including actress-turned-politician Hema Malini. In Chhattisgarh, campaigning for the third and last phase of elections in the state ended last evening. Polling is scheduled for April 24 in seven Lok Sabha constituencies of the state. Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi will address an election meeting in the afternoon at Bemetara in Durg Lok Sabha constituency.

In Madhya Pradesh, campaigning for the ten seats ended. These seats are Vidhisha, Dewas, Indore, Dhar, Ujjain. Ratlam, Mandsour, Khandwa, Khargoun and Betul. A total of 118 candidates, including 17 women, are in the fray, whose political fate will be decided by more than one crore 69 lakh voters. In all, 19,446 polling booths have been set up in the ten parliamentary seats where polls will be held on Thursday. Over 106000 government employees have been engaged for the polls in the state.