Lucknow, Apr 24, 2024, IANS

Lucknow, April 24 (IANS) The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh will now call up 50 voters each every day and convey the ‘Pranam’ (greeting) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to every household.

The BJP functionaries will also urge the voters to cast their votes on polling day before they begin other tasks.

The initiative has been planned to increase voter awareness, especially in view of the perceptible dip in the polling percentage in the first phase of the Lok Sabha polls in UP.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been urging people in his rallies to convey his ‘pranam’ to voters and urge them with ‘pehle matdaan, phir jalpan (vote first, breakfast later’.

He has also been underlining the importance of every vote in his speeches.

Data show that the average polling percentage in UP’s eight parliamentary seats which went to polls in the first phase dropped from 66.58 in 2019 to 60.25 per cent this year -- a fall of over 6 per cent.

The biggest drop of over 9 per cent has been recorded in Muzaffarnagar. Rampur, too, witnessed a sharp drop in polling percentage as only 54.77 per cent of voters turned up at polling booths this year as against 63.19 per cent in 2019.

BJP sources said that state president Bhupendra Chaudhary and state general secretary (organisation) Dharampal Singh, too, have been asked to step up day-to-day monitoring to bolster the ground-level mobilization in a bid to increase the polling percentage in the upcoming phases.

The measures also include forming ‘Panna Samitis’ which would include at least one member of each family in the voter list of that particular booth. “This is also a busy time for farmers who are engaged in harvesting wheat and it is also the wedding season,” said a senior BJP functionary.

BJP state general secretary Sanjay Rai said that the heatwave conditions had certainly led to a fall in polling percentage. “But the BJP supporters came out to vote more vociferously as compared to those of the opposition,” he said.