by Soutik Biswas | 10:27 UK time, Friday, 1 May 2009
Mumbai is voting. Across a basketball court inside an "international" school turned polling station in the posh Cuffe Parade area, turnout is a steady trickle. On a notice board outside, the school promises "piped music, air-conditioned classrooms, biometric attendance and wireless internet", among other things, to its students.
Unsurprisingly, the school is in one of the city's smartest neighbourhoods and part of the south Mumbai constituency, infamous for its apathy to politics. Turnout in this constituency has barely touched 30% in previous elections.
I bump into Shilpa Khandelwal, a young clothes designer. She has just cast her ballot at a polling booth at the school. The booths are examples of modest Indian ingenuity: small cubbyholes are partitioned and covered by white cloth and held together by bamboo near the school's hard basketball court.
Ms Khandelwal talks briskly, exuding a confident air. "You know what, the rich and upper middle classes have made a mistake by staying away from politics here," she tells me.
"Politicians are only looking at slums in this debauched voting system," she says with a hint of anger in her voice.
So she has decided to rectify the mistake by casting her ballot this time. It helped that she attended a talk recently about the virtues of the vote; it helped her to understand why ballots can make a difference, "however small".
"I don't remember the person who gave us the talk. But he told us how important it is to vote. We can influence and change a lot of things, even in a small way, by voting" she smiled.
Ms Khandelwal hopes that this time residents of south Mumbai - where last November's bloody attacks took place - will wake up and vote in large numbers. It's three hours into the voting, and she feels that turnout still looks a tad thin.
"For me," she says, "the issues are of good governance, improved security, infrastructure, education". I ask her whether she has a regular supply of drinking water and electricity.
"Oh, all that is fine here."
On the other side of the basketball court, the poor and the hoi polloi of the area vote. They live and work on the margins of this constituency. Shaila Kara Naqvi is waiting for her husband, who owns a small shop selling electrical goods. He is voting inside. She says civic amenities are shabby where she stays. "We have lot of problems with water and electricity. Water just comes on the tap for one hour every day."
BBC INDIA ELECTION TRAIN:Heading to Hyderabad
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