The upcoming Bihar Assembly elections will be held in the month of September and October, the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Nasim Zaidi said on Sunday.
To ensure peaceful polls, extensive central forces will be deployed in Bihar to check muscle power and reworked expenditure monitoring system will be deployed to curb money power, CEC said.
Terming the Bihar polls as “mother of all elections”, Zaidi said that the electoral rolls will be prepared by July 31.
Going by precedents, the election timings would be somewhere in September or October, he said, adding they are yet to begin the process of finalising a schedule.
He said the EC will have to take into account weather conditions, festivals, exams, holidays, heavy monsoon, heavy rains and floods before arriving at exact schedule.
Zaidi also refused to go into the number of phases in which the assembly polls will be held.
“Abuse of money is a big problem in Bihar. Therefore, this time we are going in for more systematic efforts. Certain legal amendments are yet to come from the Law Ministry. But within our powers, we have launched expenditure monitoring,” said Zaidi.
He said the EC has undertaken mapping of all constituencies of Bihar into three categories. Where EC finds maximum sensitivity, it plans to deploy central police forces “well in time.”
“…We will identify this time persons who serve as a channel for distributing bribe or for distribution of liquor, distribution of gifts. This assessment is still going on and we hope to come up with a re-strategised expenditure monitoring which we will roll out at an appropriate time,” he said.
