lunch crunch bombardment
Election Commission officials who were busy monitoring the polling from the control room were stunned as they were bombarded with calls coming from the election officials, complaining that they were not being provided with lunch at the booths they were working in. The control room officials who were well aware of the macro and micro details about the field staff, took time to understand the matter they were not supposed to address. Notably, organising an election being a challenging task, the entire government machinery working under the election commission was put to the task. To ensure that the officials worked with dedication during the election, EC provided them with TA and DA during the poll duty in advance. They were equipped with modern gadgets too to disseminate information between the EC and the field staffers. Thus the franctic calls coming from the field staffers complaining about on-availability of lunch took them by surprise. They expected queries from them asking them about on what to do if the electronic voting machines (EVM) malfunctioned or on how to seal them on completion of the polling. Baffled over what to do, they said they would see to it that such hiccups did not recur by having such issues addressed during the training programmes organised before the election.
Breathing dust
The motorists and those riding two-wheelers aside from the pedestrians are breathing dust while going from Dehradun to Haridwar and vice versa. This is because of Public Works Department now engaged in widening a national highway. On an average, one lakh vehicles cross the road daily. The objective is good, but it entails suffering for the commuters, given faulty execution of the project. To provide longevity of the road, they are constructing nullahs in the areas which receive huge volume of water. However, to facilitate the builders, they have paved certain roads, leaving the construction of the nullahs incomplete. later, they realized that they had committed a blunder. They are now engaged in digging the road again to complete the unfinished task. This is what is forcing the commuters and the pedestrians alike to eat dust. Some, however, say that things have been left in such a mess deliberately, with a design to lend credence to the BJP coined slogan pointing the crumbling roads. Whatever the motive, the people are at the receiving end of things, crying for a solution to rid them of the dust getting into their lungs.