Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora and Election Commissioners Sushil Chandra and Rajiv Kumar will soon visit Bihar to take stock of poll preparation on the ground before announcing the dates for Assembly election in the state.
Arora said this on Monday at an international webinar, in which poll management bodies from across the world shared their experiences of conducting elections amidst the pandemic.
The Commission was hosting the webinar on the completion of its one-year chairmanship of the Association of World Election Bodies (A-WEB). AWEB is the largest association of Election Management Bodies (EMBs) in the world and has 115 EMBs as members.
Arora said that elections in India pose formidable challenges on account of the large electorate, geographical and linguistic diversity and differing climatic conditions. With 72.9 million electors in the state, Bihar polls, Arora said, will perhaps be the largest election conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic till date.
Highlighting the impact of Covid-19 on election preparation, Arora said that the maximum number of voters at a polling station in Bihar has been reduced from 1,500 to 1,000. The number of polling stations has been increased by 40 per cent — from 65,000 to 1,00,000. These changes have huge implications, he said, in terms of logistics and manpower.
Among the countries that made presentations on Monday about conducting elections this year amid the pandemic were Fiji, Korea, Taiwan, Mongolia, South Africa, Bangladesh and Malawi.