Senior police and civil officials of Jagatsinghpur administration inspect a polling booth at Gobindpur village. Telegraph picture

The polling booths at the proposed Posco project villages are being brought under live webcasting surveillance scanner.

As the troubled areas are all set to go to polls after a decade, authorities are intent on free and fair polls in the hypersensitive project areas.

All the four sensitive polling booths in Gobindpur and Dhinkia, which were the nerve centre of the anti-Posco movement, will be under live webcasting. The booths fall under Balikuda-Earasama Assembly segment in Jagatsinghpur district.

“All the four polling booths of Dhinkia and Gobindpur villages have been earmarked for live webcasting. Webcasters have already been trained to webcast the polling. Web connectivity has already been put in place at the booths. A test has also been conducted,” said Jagatsinghpur district collector Satya Kumar Mallick.

The basic idea behind webcasting is to promote free and fair election. Webcasters will operate webcam and capture live polling video, which will be uploaded on the district administration’s official website. The move is expected to help keep a close vigil on the activities at the polling stations.

This is a measure being taken up by the authorities to prevent any untoward incident, said Mallick.

The prominent anti-Posco movement territory, which has remained out of bounds for government agencies, including police, for the past several years, is now in the midst of hectic campaign trails by candidates in the fray.

With people living in the panchayat willing to exercise their franchise, polling would be held in these trouble-torn areas almost after a decade.

In the face of resistance movement, polls could not be held at the troubled zone in 2009 general elections. Panchayat polls had met the same fate last time following voters’ discernible disillusionment towards the mandate exercise.

The BJD has re-nominated its sitting MLA Prasanta Muduli on the Balikuda-Erasama seat, while the Congress’s Lalatendu Mohapatra and CPI nominee Abhijit Sahoo are also in the fray from this Assembly constituency. The proposed Rs 52,000 crore worth Posco steel project, widely billed as the country’s largest FDI, comes under the said Assembly seat.

Ahead of the polls, the police teams had made their way to the hitherto impregnable Dhinkia village where residents had been stoutly resisting the proposed steel mill by the South Korean steel major.