With Mumbai to go for polling on April 29, the political parties have intensified their polling campaigning’s to woo voters, but on the other hand, a Mumbai resident kicked off an online campaign called #VoteDaalo, to encourage first-time voters.
According to DNA, the unique campaign called #VoteDaalo was kicked off by Vinay Maurya, already known for his ongoing viral campaign #HelmetDaalo. On his Instagram handle @TheIndianMotorcyclist, Maurya conducted polls after the first phase to understand the mood of young voters in which over 300 people participated in less than 12 hours. The poll results showed that 47 percent of the participants are in the age group of 18-22 and 23 percent of the participants said they won’t be voting in these elections for various reasons.
So in order to encourage first-time voters, Vinay decided to start a challenging motorcycle journey from Gateway of India in Mumbai to India Gate in Delhi and back to the Gateway of India. He travelled 3,226 kilometre covering five states and a Union territory. In five days, the journey went across Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, and Delhi. He designed Pledge to Vote stickers and distributed it to people in Mumbai, Vapi, Surat, Bharuch, Baroda, Modasa, Udaipur, Ajmer, Jaipur, Gurgaon, New Delhi, Kota, Ujjain, Indore, Dhule, Nashik, and Thane.
Vinay Maurya told the DNA, “It was one of the toughest expedition that I had taken. The idea of this journey was to not waste time and quickly meet as many people as I could before the next phases. The third phase of elections was just approaching and I wanted to spread the word faster because of every vote matters in a democracy. What I also realized during the journey that not many kids know about the election system and the process behind it. It is probably because the parliamentary procedure was taught in early secondary school and many have forgotten even the number of seats in Lok Sabha. I will be writing a request to various Universities in India to conduct a session on the electoral process to refresh the memory of kids to make informed voting decisions.”
