NT NETWORK
PANAJI
Most of the North Goa district and youth icons selected by the Goa chief electoral office for the state assembly election are not available. Some of them have not provided their phone numbers to the chief electoral office and when election officials visited their homes, they were not present.
According to election officials, of the 14 icons, few were accessible including Madhav Borkar, Vishnu Shetgaonkar, Brahmanand Sankhwalkar and Prasad Pankar, while others were not reachable and remained too busy with their professional assignments.
The Election Commission chooses state and district icons to make the electors aware of their rights and duties. It does not pay any honorarium to its icons. The precondition while choosing the icons is that they should not have political affiliations and should be easily accessible.
When this daily tried to contact the district icons fashion designer Wendell Rodricks and sportsperson Xavier D’Souza, they did not answer the call, while Mandar Desai’s phone was not reachable. Another icon Isabel De Santa Rita Vaz had not provided her phone number to the officials; hence she could not be contacted.
Interestingly, Akshada Bandekar, a youth icon, who could not be contacted by the election officials and whose phone number was missing from the list, informed this daily that she has recorded election awareness-related songs and jingles and also participated in a walkathon rally held on Sunday. Besides, she said that she has also cooperated with officials in motivating youth on ethical voting.
Another youth icon and musician Mukesh Ghatwal said he could not participate in the walkathon rally as he was busy in New Delhi for the Republic Day event. He, however, claimed that his video songs, which are being circulated on the social media, have motivated youth and he has been pitching for better voter participation in his individual capacity.
A senior election officer said, “Since the Election Commission needs to shoot several short duration video clips and organise activities to promote awareness among electors, we need icons, who are easily available to render their services but unfortunately most of them are too busy with their professional assignments.”
With an aim to exceed the 83 per cent mark of voters registered during the 2012 assembly election, the Goa state electoral office has devised various measures by appointing personalities from various fields like arts and culture, music, health, sports, theatre, literature and fashion designing to motivate youth, women, differently-abled people and elderly people to come out and vote.
Sources said most of these icons could not reach out to people through programmes such as systematic voter education and electoral participation (SVEEP), which aims at increasing the voter turnout as also quality of electoral participation in terms of informed and ethical voting.
There are altogether 14 icons, who have been selected in North Goa and they include Padmashree Prasad Sawkar, Madhav Borkar, Ajay Vaidya, Isabel de Santa Rita Vaz, Wendell Rodricks, Gopinath Gawas, Vishnu Shetgaonkar, Prasad Pankar and Brahmanand Sankhwalkar, while Mukesh Ghatwal, Mandar Desai, Akshada Bandekar, Nehern Acharya and Xavier D’Souza are youth icons for North district.
The six state icons are Subodh Kerkar, painter; Antonio Rosario Fern alias Rose Ferns, triatrist; Sagun Krishna Kamat, cricketer; Suresh Amonkar, doctor; Sonia Shirsat, artiste; and Hema Sardesai, singer, who recently resigned as an icon.