The high-pitched biennial elections of Agartala Press Club to form 11-member new management committee ended last night. More than 98 per cent of total 288 electorates of Agartala media fraternity cast their votes.
The day started with Annual General Meeting at Rabindra Bhawan. Voting started after the AGM was over and continued till 5pm. Returning Officer Advocate Sandip Dutta Choudhury announced the results at around 10pm. The elections threw up mixed results as candidates of both the contesting panels – ‘Save Agartala Press Club’ and ‘Forum for Development of Protestion of Media Community’ (FDPMC) fought a tough electoral battle.
The Returning Officer announced the members of newly elected committee in which veteran journalist and editor of bengali daily Syandan Patrika Subal Kumar Dey (Save Agartala Press Club) was elected as president went past Jayanta Bhattacharjee (FDPMC) in a nail-biting finish.
However, Arun Nath registered an easy win as vice president. So was the case for secretary post in which Pranab Sarkar (FDPMC) won comfortably against Jayanta Debnath (Save Agartala Press Club) for the post of secretary. Both Subal Kumar Dey and Pranab Sarkar were the president and secretary respectively in outgoing Managing Committee.
Tapan Majumder, who was treasurer of the previous committee, also registered victory as the treasurer while Debabrata Chakraborty and Ramakanta Dey have been elected as assistant secretaries. The five elected members are- Ranjan Roy, Prabir Das, Manish Acharjee, Kamal Chowdhury and Mihir Lal Sarkar.
Out of the total 11 seats, six including secretary, two assistant secretaries and treasurer posts went to FDPMC while remaining five including the president and vice president went to Save Agartala Press Club.
The most striking feature of this year’s Agartala Press Club elections was that both the contesting panels came up with written poll promises for welfare and betterment of media community.
