Villagers boycott elections

Siddayyanadoddi has around 75 houses and about 400 people live in the village. It was part of Kanakapura Assembly constituency before delimitation. After the delimitation exercise in 2008, the village became part of Ramnagar Assembly constituency.

The village is in a bad condition without proper road, clean drinking water, drainage, streetlights, bus stand and other basic facilities. In fact, if villagers are to be believed, none of the village roads have seen asphalt for the last 10 years.

Villagers complained that none of the MLAs in the past worked for the development of the village. “We have been voting for P G R Sindhia for the last several years. But he has not done anything for the development of the village. We are fed up now and do not want to vote,” Gurumurthy, one of the villagers, said.

He further complained that sewerage water from Bangalore has caused immense damage to crops in and around the village. Repeated requests by people to prevent flow of drainage water into farms have fallen on deaf ears, he said.

As the news about villagers boycotting the voting spread, members of various political parties arrived to convince them. Representatives of political parties held several rounds of meetings with the village elders, but to no avail. Though some of them finally made up their mind to vote, it was too late by the time they arrived at the polling booth.