On Wednesday, film director Ashok Pandit showed up to a voting place to vote in the Maharashtra Assembly elections.
Speaking to the media, Pandit expressed his opinions on the significance of voting.
“This should, in my opinion, make voting mandatory. Only then will things in our nation change. If not, the public will dismiss it as meaningless and claim that one vote is insignificant. However, just one vote is crucial to the growth of the nation’s grandeur,” the director said.
Akshay Kumar, Raj Kumar Rao, and Kabir Khan were among the several celebrities that came early to cast their ballots.
In the meanwhile, Maharashtra’s single-phase assembly elections, which started earlier this morning, had a 6.61 percent voter participation by 9 am on Wednesday.
According to Maharashtra’s polling board statistics, the district of Osmanabad had the lowest voter participation, at 4.85% till 9 am, while the naxal-affected district of Gadchiroli had the highest, at 12.33%.
A voter turnout of 6.25% was registered in Mumbai city. The percentages are as follows: Suburban 7.88, Nagpur 6.86, Thane 6.66, Aurangabad 7.05, Pune 5.53, Nashik 6.89, Jalgaon 5.85, Satara 5.14, Kolhapur 7.38, Dhule 6.79, Palghar 7.30, Nanded 5.42, Ratnagiri 9.30, and Latur 5.91.
2,086 independent candidates are among the 4,136 candidates running in the elections. The NCP is running for 59 seats, the Shiv Sena for 81, and the BJP for 149. There are 101 candidates from the Congress, 95 from the Shiv Sena (UBT), and 86 from the NCP (Sharad Pawar group).
In addition to other minor parties, the BSP is running for 237 seats. There are around 9.7 crore registered voters in the state. A loud campaign was run for Maharashtra’s 288 assembly seats before to the elections.
The main competition is between the Congress-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) and the BJP-led Mahayuti coalition.
The Congress, Shiv Sena (UBT), and the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar group) make up the opposition MVA, while the BJP, Shiv Sena, and the Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar faction) make up the governing BJP-led Mahayuti coalition.
The BJP won 105 seats, the Shiv Sena 56, and the Congress 44 in the 2019 Maharashtra assembly elections. The Congress secured 42 seats, the Shiv Sena 63, and the BJP 122 in 2014.
