As voting reached Calcutta and some of its suburbs on Saturday, The Telegraph spoke to voters on issues that concerned them. Here’s what some of them had to say

Falling interest

Uma Dutta Chowdhury, 62, was sitting with a group of senior citizens at Surjya Sen Nagar, a Tollygunge pocket after casting her vote on Saturday.

A pensioner who lives alone, Dutta Chowdhury said she was struggling to make ends meet because of the sliding interest rates at banks and rising prices of essential commodities.She gets the family pension of her late father.

“This central government wants to change everything. A day is not far when one has to pay the bank for keeping money with it,” said Dutta Chowdhury.Other members of the group nodded their heads in agreement as she spoke.“I just pray that I don’t have to financially depend on others at this stage of my life,” said Dutta Chowdhury.

Rub it the right way

Purbasha Roy, an actor, had come to cast her vote at the Future Foundation School in the Tollygunge seat. The 25-year-old said she was “aghast” at the “unsavoury comments" made recently at a TV debate by a political leader addressing a “woman colleague”.

“A society should be judged by the way it treats women. Their abuse shows the mentality of such political leaders. They have a problem with any woman who speaks her mind,” said Purbasha.

Days later, she heard the same leader threatening artistes with “rogre debo”.

“Oder vote diye rogre dewa uchit (They should be taught a lesson with ballots),” she said.

Sreshtha Banerjee, another first-time voter at the same booth, said the derogatory language used by vote seekers has made politics “an object of aversion” for many young people.

“This problems cuts across political parties. The discourse has stooped to such a level that it devalues humanity,” she said.

History, retold

Patralekha and Kakali Mukherjee, daughter and mother, came out of a booth in Behala West around 10am on Saturday. Patralekha, who studies nutrition in Vidyasagar College, voted for the first time in her life. “Women's safety and education are the two most important issues for me,” said the 19-year-old.Kakali, who teaches history at a city school, said she was disturbed by the “attempts by some elements to distort the secular history of India”.

“The politics of Bengal has also become communal. It is starkly visible in the poll campaigns. All parties are to blame for this,” she said.

“The rise in fuel prices should be the discourse, not Hindu-Muslim rivalry,” she said.

First vote, make it count

Anwesha Dasgupta, 21, had applied for a voting card much before the 2019 general elections. The card was delayed and she missed voting. This time, she was determined not to let the chance go because she wanted to be “counted in the fight against communal polarisation and politics of hatred”.

On Saturday, Anwesha and her mother were one of the early voters at a booth on Biren Roy Road west in Behala West Assembly seat.

“After waiting for around 10 minutes, I entered the voting compartment. I paused for a few seconds and the pressed the button. It felt as if I had asserted my stake in the affairs of my land," said Anwesha, a student of multimedia and animation at St Xavier's College.

“My vote was my way of saying no to division and hatred,” she said.

Dasgupta had to do several rounds of Bhavani Bhavan to get her voting card to sort out some documentation problems. “I am happy my labour was fruitful,” she said.

Every vote counts

Pictures by Sanat Kr Sinha and Gautam Bose

Ghennamoni Naskar had not voted the last time. This time, the mother of three did. “Every vote matters,” said the woman who finds it difficult to stand because of arthritis. At Naskarpara in Bhangar, she said: “If you stop to hear leaders of some prominent

political parties there is no word on development. It’s all about religion.”

The woman was thankful to voters in the queue who made way for her so that she could leave early. "It is wrong to divide people,” she said while waiting for a van rickshaw that would drop her home.