BJP set to appoint ‘panna pramukhs’

PATNA: Taking a leaf from its win in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh assembly elections, the BJP’s Bihar unit has decided to create an organisational body of booth-level ‘panna pramukhs’ in the state.
The state BJP leadership is of the view that the ‘panna pramukhs’ played a major role in the party’s victory in the two states. The job of a ‘panna pramukh’ is to take a page of voters’ list of a polling booth and reach out to every voter on his page.
If a polling booth has 1,200 names on 10 pages, a ‘panna pramukh’ reaches out to 120 voters.“The ‘panna pramukh’ treats the voter like a family member.... greets him or her with folded hands and discusses family and other matters,” said a Bihar BJP functionary who had gone to Gujarat to stump for the party.
“In Bihar, our booth level committee is the basic organisational unit, but now we will have this new body as our party’s basic unit,” state BJP spokesman and former MLA Prem Ranjan Patel said, adding the job of the ‘panna pramukh’ would be to inform the voters about the Narendra Modi government’s achievements.
The party has started making preparations for the parliamentary election in 2019 and the assembly election the next year. The party has already formed its booth-level committees at 40,000 of the state’s 62,780 polling booths.