Shyam Saran Negi, unbiased India’s first and oldest voter who during the last decade turned an icon for participatory democracy, died on the age of 105 on Saturday, officers mentioned.
Negi, who voted for the Himachal Pradesh meeting elections on Wednesday, died of pure causes within the small hamlet of Kalpa in Kinnaur, roughly 265kms from the state capital Shimla.
“Negi ji was an icon for voters not solely within the state however throughout the nation. Sadly, he was not preserving effectively for the previous few days as a result of age-related illnesses,” Kinnaur deputy commissioner Abid Hussain Sadiq mentioned, saying his demise.
Negi, in style as masterjee within the village of fewer than 2,000 individuals, was a schoolteacher and had been an envoy for the Election Fee.
Until this yr, Negi would go to the native polling centre however selected to vote from house this time as a result of ill-health, making use of the postal poll possibility.
Since final month, the Election Fee has allowed all residents above the age of 80, individuals with disabilities larger than 40% and absentee voters within the state to vote utilizing postal ballots.
It was Negi’s first time utilizing that possibility, however presumably a report thirty fourth time that he exercised his proper to elect a consultant.
The story of how Negi got here to be India’s first voter begins within the oddity of election timing in Kalpa village. In 1951, when the village was often called Chini, elections had been held two months sooner than in the remainder of the nation since Kinnaur receives heavy snowfall, making the transporting of poll containers tough.
Negi, born on July 1, 1917, on the time was a schoolteacher assigned on polling obligation.
He requested the polling social gathering at his village to permit him to solid his vote rapidly in order that he might head to the station and take up his duties. The officer involved accepted his request and he thus turned the nation’s first voter, a distinction that was outmatched solely by his drive to vote in each subsequent polls – whether or not for panchayat or Lok Sabha.
A quiet obligation
Negi was unaware of his standing because the nation’s first voter till the Election Fee tracked him down in July 2007. Indian Administrative Service officer Manisha Nanda, now extra chief secretary (public works division) in Himachal Pradesh, first learnt about him from the picture electoral roll.
M Sudha Devi, a 2003-batch IAS officer then posted as Kinnaur deputy commissioner, met Negi at Kalpa and subsequently verified from data that he was certainly the primary to vote.
In 2012, then chief election commissioner Naveen Chawla reached Negi’s house in Kalpa to felicitate him.
Through the 2014 elections, Google and the EC made a video that includes Negi for its Pledge to Vote marketing campaign.
The video received extra views than any one other video launched beneath the identical marketing campaign, that includes celebrities akin to Amitabh Bachchan, Dia Mirza, Arjun Rampal and cricketer Virender Sehwag.
On Saturday, Sadiq, who’s the returning officer this time, mentioned Negi’s vote will likely be counted.