Going sky high to increase voter awareness

A Tamil Nadu district has created interesting ways to increase voting this assembly election.
A Ganesh Nadar/Rediff.com reports.

After producing a popular song Vote Podu, which is a hit on social media, Tamil Nadu officials are coming up with more novel ways of increasing voter awareness.

Last week, Nagapattinam District Collector S Palanisami went paragliding to encourage voting.

"There are 36 colleges in this district. The students are all first time voters," Palanisami tells Rediff.com "We have conducted many programmes to get students to vote."

"There are six assembly constituencies in this district. Paragliding was conducted in three separate locations to create voter awareness among students and also encourage them to participate in paragliding," the IAS officer adds.

"Some of the students hesitated. So I did it to encourage them to participate. This is the first time I have done it," says Palanisami.

"It can climb up to 100 metres," the collector adds, "but I requested them to keep the height to 30 metres. I did it in one place while two of my officers participated in two other places."

Nagapattinam has a long coast line and in order to encourage voters in the fishing villages, the collector and his officials traveled the coast in six big boats and five small boats, asking the fisherfolk to vote.

"The boat ride was targeted at the womenfolk in the fishing villages," says Palanisami.

The collector has arranged various cultural programmes to create voter awareness among agricultural workers and farmers.