High up in Uttarakhand’s mountains, a first: 9 villages get polling booths for Badrinath by-election

On July 9, 45-year-old Uday Singh Rawat and his wife Anju will make a 100-km car journey, followed by an uphill trek of 10 km, to the village of Dronagiri, located at an altitude of 12,000 feet in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district.

Rawat is one of 3,838 migrants from nine hamlets in the district who can vote in their home villages — for the first time since the formation of the state in 2000 — in the July 10 Badrinath Assembly bypoll. The lack of polling booths in these villages for all these years is explained by a simple but crucial consideration: the cold.

Every year, residents of these nine high-altitude villages vacate their houses in the middle of October — when snowfall starts — and move to locations at a lower altitude, such as Gopeshwar, Karnaprayag, and Nandprayag. They return after April as the summer begins and the weather improves. Several residents have moved out, too. So, in previous Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, these migrant voters cast their ballot at polling stations that were closest to the locations they stayed in at that time, said Chamoli District Magistrate Himanshu Khurana.

Rawat, who is a health communication officer in Nandprayag, said: “This will be the first time I cast my vote in my parental village for any election. Polling for Lok Sabha or Assembly elections has never been held in my village after Uttarakhand was carved out as a separate state. I am excited to vote in my parental village where my parents reside these days.”

All nine villages — Dronagiri, Malari, Kailashpur, Gamshali, Jelum, Kosha, Jumma, Niti, and Mana — are located near the international border with China. Mana, called the “first Indian village”, is also a tourist attraction. These villages are mostly made up of people from