MARGAO: The outcome of Margao Municipal Council elections very clearly indicates that the “small players” had an absolute role to play as 20 independent candidates polled less than 100 votes each while none of the six candidates supported by the Fatorda Block Congress got even 100 votes.
All the six candidates backed by Fatorda Block Congress got below 100 votes with the highest votes of 75 which were polled by Yogesh Nagvenkar in Ward No 6 while Jessy Vaz polled 72 votes in Ward No 5.
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Yogesh admitted to the poor performance by the candidates put up by them but justified their participation in the elections on the grounds saying “we are preparing for a bigger battle and that is why it was important to participate in this election.”
The Fatorda Block Congress got total 342 votes in the six wards it contested which incidentally are lower than the votes polled by the each of the 11 councillors elected from Fatorda Assembly segment to the Margao Municipal Council.
Another disappointing player was the Citizen’s Choice Panel, which had backed 11 candidates and the total votes polled by their 11 candidates comes to only 1,321. In fact, only four of their candidates secured more than 100 votes.
The highest votes in this panel were secured by Adv Seoula Vas, who contested from Ward No 3 followed by Poma Kerkar, who secured 365 votes in Ward No 20. The other two candidates of the panel to get more than 100 votes were Nadia Vas, who polled 150 votes in Ward No 23 and Royston Gomes, who got 104 votes in Ward No 7.
Incidentally, Citizen’s Choice Panel’s Pritam Moratgiker, who contested from Ward No 24, got only nine votes, the lowest polled by any candidate in the 25 wards.
In fact former chairperson and Convenor of Shadow Council for Margao Savio Coutinho admitted that even he was shocked with the performance of their candidates and admitted that they will have to do some serious re-thinking about the role they will play henceforth.
