Gram Panchayats polls in Tripura to be held on August 8, counting on August 12

Election to Gram Panchayats in Tripura will be held on August 8 and the votes will be counted on August 12.

State Election Commissioner (SEC) Saradindu Chaudhuri announced that notification would be issued on Thursday and the last date of filing nominations was July 18 and these would be scrutinised next day.

The last date of withdrawal of candidatures is July 22.


Chaudhuri said that the elections to 606 Gram Panchayats, 35 Panchayat Samitis and eight Zilla Parishads would be held through ballot boxes.

With 33 per cent reservation of seats for women, there are 6,370 seats in 606 Gram Panchayats, 423 seats in 35 Panchayat Samitis and 116 seats in eight Zilla Parishads.

The SEC said that around 13 lakh voters were eligible to cast their votes in the local body elections.

In the last Panchayat elections held on July 27, 2019, the ruling BJP had won more than 95 per cent of the seats of which 86 per cent were unopposed, leading to an outcry from Opposition parties.

Rohingyas
Five Rohingyas were arrested from the Agartala railway station, police said on Wednesday.

Acting on a tip-off, the Government Railway Police (GRP) personnel arrested the Rohingyas on Tuesday night for their illegal entry into India from Bangladesh.

“We arrested the intruders just before they boarded a Guwahati-bound train. The Rohingyas said that they intended to go to Hyderabad in search of jobs,” a GRP official said.

The Tripura police on July 4 arrested 25 Rohingyas, including six women and seven children, from two different places in North Tripura District when they were about to board buses to first go to Guwahati and then to Hyderabad by train in search of jobs.

Due to rising infiltration from across the border, Tripura Chief Minister Manik Saha during a high-level meeting last week asked the top Border Security Force (BSF) and police officials to take appropriate measures to prevent infiltration, smuggling, illegal trade and border crimes.

BSF’s Tripura frontier Inspector General, Patel Piyush Purushottam Das, said that physical domination has been augmented with state-of-the-art surveillance technology, including Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled cameras and facial recognition tools along the 856 km India-Bangladesh border with Tripura to prevent infiltration, crimes and other illegal activities.