Delhi has 695 critical polling stations, says Election Commission

The Delhi election commission on Friday said the number of sensitive polling stations in the city has increased since the 2013 Assembly polls, which is now 695. During the 2013 polls, Delhi had 677 critical polling stations while it had 416 critical stations during the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

Officer on special duty for the model code, Rupesh Thakur, said the Northeast district had the most number of critical polling stations 157.

He said that various factors like law and order problems, expenditure, possible duplicate voters, proximity to borders or communal sensitivity are taken into account while classifying polling stations as critical.

Although, a complete list of critical polling stations is yet to be made available, Thakur said East Delhi’s Trilokpuri which witnessed communal violence in last October was sure to be on the list.

Critical polling stations have been further classified as “high critical” and “low critical”. Of the 695 critical stations, 522 are low-critical and 173 high-critical. Depending on various factors, EC officials will take a call on deploying security forces, micro-observers of expenditure and installation of CCTV cameras at these stations.

In 2013, 544 polling stations were classified as “sensitive” while 133 were “hypersensitive”. There are 11,763 polling stations in Delhi.