Kolkata, Aug 12 (IANS) The West Bengal unit of the BJP has completed the formation of booth committees for a majority of the state’s polling stations, a key step in strengthening its grassroots network ahead of next year’s crucial Assembly elections.

“Of the 81,000 polling booths in the state, the process of formation of booth committees has been completed for 65,000 booths. However, out of the 65,000, the process of verification is yet to be completed for 15,000 booths, which will be done soon,” said a state committee member of the BJP.

Each booth committee will have one president and two associates. A detailed training program for the newly appointed booth committee members will be conducted from August 16 to August 22. By then, the verification of the 15,000 booths will also be completed, the party’s state committee member added.

He admitted that the formation work remains incomplete in some minority dominated areas and in those pockets where the system could not be started because of the violence unleashed by the ruling Trinamool Congress activists.

The Bengal unit of the BJP has already started the process of conducting a digital survey of the booth-level and district-level organization strengths of the party

A BJP insider said that although the organisational strengths of both district-level and booth-level will be under the purview of the proposed digital survey, the focus will be mainly on the booth-level, and this will be done to ensure that members of a particular booth-level committee are also voters of that particular booth.

Already, a ground-level physical survey had been conducted by a team of state BJP leaders in different districts of West Bengal, where the surveyors reached the booth levels to have grassroots-level findings on the actual organizational strength at those levels.

“The digital survey is the next step to identify the lapses that got somehow overlooked during the physical survey, so that the grassroots level organizational structure of the party could be made full-proof as far as possible before the crucial West Bengal assembly elections next year,” said the party’s state committee insider.

–IANS

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