Kolkata: Voters queueing up at polls booths in West Bengal will be greeted with a dash of colour as the Election Commission has directed that booths housed in schools should be made ‘beautiful’ and the Education Department deciding to pitch in by putting up paintings.
A directive has been sent to school managements as well as the state Education Department on behalf of the EC that the walls of the polling booths should be decorated so that voters get a pleasant feeling, the OSD of the Chief Electoral Commissioner, Amit Roy Chowdhury, told PTI.
The purpose of the exercise is not only to make voting a pleasant experience, but also to raise awareness about the importance of participating in the election process, Chowdhury said. “We sent directives to the managements of schools and Education Department where polling stations will be based under the ‘Make your polling station Beautiful’ programme to make them more colourful and beautiful.”
The Education Department, on its part, has decided that the walls of the booths will be decorated with paintings, portraits and thoughts of famous personalities like Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda and Rishi Aurobindo.
A Joint Secretary of the Education Department said, “The department has decided to decorate booths based in the schools with the portraits, paintings and thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Rishi Aurobindo and Kazi Nazrul Islam would be installed in the booths. The Education Department has decided that the paintings and the decoration work will be done by the students of the schools under the supervision of teachers.
The exercise to making polling stations beatiful was carried out first during the Delhi Assembly poll earlier this year and it received a positive feedback from the voters too, EC officials said.
The lines of Tagore’s famous poetry “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high” and lines from the “Gitanjali” will be used to decorate the class rooms. Swami Vivekanada’s stirring speech to awaken the youth of India during the British rule will also feature.
Apart from paintings and thoughts, the polling booths will also have important messages of Election commission written in English and Bengali. Renowned schools like Baghbazar Multipurpose, Jodhpur Park Boys, Bethune Collegiate school, Dum Dum Motijheel Boys which will host polling stations in final phase in May 12 will start the work of painting the walls once the exams are over by the end of this week.
An official of the Education Department, however, referred to lack of funds for arranging raw materials for doing up the school rooms. “We will try our best to do what has been directed by the EC, but lack of funds is also a matter of concern as painting the walls need raw materials,” he said. (PTI)
