Voters cross borders to make a difference on polling day
Lisa Monteiro | TNN | Updated: May 20, 2019, 12:25 IST
Kanak Kumar Sawant
PANAJI: Voting was on the top of the priority list for many, this bypoll. Instead of catching a few winks on Sunday morning after an overnight bus journey to the state from Pune, sleepy-eyed Kanak Kumar Sawant headed straight for the polling station.
She made the trip to Goa with the sole intention of not wasting her vote. She did the same last month for the Lok Sabha polls, returning for her classes a day after casting her vote.
"It's my duty to vote and choose the right candidate. We can't keep waiting for change, we have to walk out of the house, vote and make the change," she says.
This time she couldn't get a return ticket for Sunday, managing one only on Tuesday. "I'm missing my classes, so I will have to tell my friends to send me the notes," she says.
"Just because I'm studying in Pune doesn't mean that I don't care about Goa. We need a good candidate for Panaji. Although it's just one vote, it does make a difference," she tells TOI.
Avantika Joglekar also travelled from Maharashtra especially for the bypoll. A fan of former chief minister Manohar Parrikar, she felt his absence this election. "It was very confusing for me this time. We are sad that Parrikar is not there. It leaves us in the dark. I guess I'm going with what's best for the city," she tells TOI.
Speaking about the effort put in to travel, especially to exercise her franchise, she said there shouldn't be excuses for those living in the state, as the bypoll was scheduled on a Sunday. "We have seen in the past how even a single vote can mess up a lot of things. If we don't exercise our vote then we don't have the right to say things are not going our way," she says, adding that she was pleasantly surprised that she didn't have to wait in a long queue to vote.