Residents of remote Uttarakhand village to boycott LS polls over non-construction of road

The villagers of Dumak in Uttarakhand's Chamoli district have decided to boycott the upcoming Lok Sabha polls over the non-construction of a vital road linking the village with the district headquarters for which they have been agitating for four decades.

Whenever elections are round the corner, the villagers renew their poll boycott call in the hope of getting their long-standing demand fulfilled. Construction agencies rush equipment to the village raising their hopes, but those are withdrawn as soon as the elections are over.

Dumak hosts one of the remotest polling stations in Chamoli district.

The residents of several villages of the area have formed a joint struggle committee for the construction of the road from Syund to Dumak and Kalgot.

The convenor of the committee and former head of Dumak village, Prem Singh Sanwal, said the people of Dasholi and Pankhanda areas have boycotted elections twice since the 1990s to demand the construction of the road.

The residents of Dumak had even decided to boycott the 2019 Lok Sabha election, he said, adding that on the district administration's initiative, the road construction department sent machines to the village about a week before the polling day, which led to the withdrawal of the poll boycott call.

However, as soon as the polling process was over, the department took back the machines.

It has been five years since but the fate of the road is still uncertain, Sanwal said.

The angry villagers had launched a long protest in January.

The agitation was postponed after the intervention and assurance of Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami but the construction work has still not started, prompting the villagers to take a collective decision to boycott the upcoming election, Sanwal said.

A memorandum was submitted to the district magistrate on March 15 regarding the people's intention to boycott the polls, he said, adding that the DM is yet to respond to it.

In June 2022, the present chief election commissioner, Rajiv Kumar, trekked to the remote village of Dumak to inspect the polling booth there, Sanwal said. He spoke to locals about the problems they face in daily commutation and assured them that the DM would soon visit the village and address the issue within a month, Sanwal said.

However, nothing positive has happened on that front so far.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)