Chandigarh, May 29 – Haryana will soon have call centres at State and district level for the convenience of the voters as each such centre would be equipped with a dedicated phone. While stating this here today, Chief Electoral Officer, Haryana, Mrs Sumita Misra said that Rs 45 lakh have been earmarked to implement the scheme. She said that timings of the voter helpline call centre would be from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. from Monday to Saturday. The service would be web enabled so as to quickly respond to the queries and problems of the voters. Initially, three seats in BSNL are being set up. These would be increased depending on response before the next election. BSNL has been finalized to run the call centres as well as send SMS twice in a year. A common short code “1965” had also been allotted to Haryana for this purpose by the Election Commission of India from the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India, she added.
She said that BSNL would also be required to transmit bulk SMS to the voters. It would be required to send SMS at least twice or thrice in a year to all mobile holders in the state who are using services of any telecom service providers including BSNL. About 1.26 crore mobile users in the state would be benefitted from this facility of SMS, Mrs Sumita Misra added.