A voter survey conducted by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), an election watchdog and organisation working on electoral and political reforms has painted a dismal picture of the government’s performance in Uttarakhand on parameters like employment, healthcare facilities and agricultural loan availability in a survey conducted by it.

This survey was done from October 2018 to December 2018.

In the survey which covered approximately 2500 respondents in all the five parliamentary constituencies of Uttarakhand, the voters were asked to judge the performance of the government on ten most important issues.

ADR used a five point scale and adjudged the performance of government as ‘Good’ ( 5), ‘ Average’ (3) and ‘Bad’ ( 1). The survey projected ‘Better Employment Opportunities’, Better healthcare facilities and ‘Agriculture Loan Availability’ as three top priorities of the people of Uttarakhand with 51.61, 41.85 and 30.54 per cent of voters listing them respectively. Interestingly in all three parameters, the rating of the government was stated as less than average by the voters. On a scale of one to five, the voters of Uttarakhand gave 2.45 points on employment opportunities, 2.39 on healthcare and 2.20 on availability of the agriculture loan availability to the government. In rural Uttarakhand, top most voters’ priorities were ‘Better Employment Opportunities’ (47 percent), ‘Agriculture Loan Availability’ (44 percent) and ‘Electricity for Agriculture’ (42 percent).  Here too the voters gave below average marks to the government. The survey also shows that the government has performed poorly on agriculture subsidy for seeds and fertilisers with people giving just 2.29 points to it in rural Uttarakhand. The survey depicts ‘Better Employment Opportunities (61 percent), Better Hospitals/Primary Healthcare Centres (50 per cent) and Traffic Congestion (47 per cent) as top three priorities of the people of Urban Uttarakhand.

In the cities of the state people gave 2.48 marks to the government on ‘Employment Opportunities, 2.39 on ‘Better Hospitals/Primary Healthcare Centres’ and 2.32 to ‘Traffic Congestion’ which again is a below average performance.   In addition, the government has performed poorly on Better Public Transport (2.41) and Better Roads (2.41) in urban Uttarakhand.