Odishatv Bureau

Bhubaneswar: The State Election Commission (SEC) has made adequate security arrangements in 29 districts including the Maoist prone districts where the first phase Panchayat polls will begin tomorrow.

Informing the media here this afternoon, SEC secretary Rabindranath Sahu said “Out of the 189 Zilla Parishad Zones in the Odisha Gram Panchayat elections, election for Zilla Parishad member will not be held in one Komana-II region. As many as 716 candidates will contest for the remaining 188 posts tomorrow.

Apart from this elaborate security arrangements have been made to ensure free and fair polls in the Maoist affected districts

“The  State Police forces including SOG and DVF jawans have been deployed in some polling areas to carry out sanitisation and intelligent based operations,” said Rahul PR, SDPO Malkangiri.

Similar arrangements have also been made in Koraput district. “The BSF personnel have intensified patrolling in nearby areas. Each block has been divided into two sectors. Small troops will be deployed under one Inspector for area patrolling and also handling hostage situations,” said VR Rao , Additional SP, Koraput.

Nuapada Collector Mohd Siddique Alam, said, “The security deployment has been done according to the sensitivity of the polling stations. CCTV cameras have been installed in the hyper sensitive polling stations and in worst cases, some adequate forces will be deployed as well.”

“Special police forces will be deployed in the Interstate border areas to check all the vehicles entering and exiting the state at the border check posts. Forces will also be assigned to carry out patrolling and nakabandi in the non-election zones to provide information of each block,” said Ganjam SP, Asish Singh.

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