Lately, there’s been an ever increasing debate on how to lure young voters, including 1st time voters, to participate in the functioning of our democracy – the process of voting. But, despite much efforts, both by government and Election Commission, the results have been somewhat disappointing, failing to attract the Young voters to come out and participate in the process of choosing our political leaders. Now, the question remains: how to change this sad fact? How to make Voting ‘cool’? Though, there can be multiple answers; I here propose three easy but effective solutions. One, youth, these days, relate more to social media personalities than they do with conventional celebrities. Keeping this in mind, both EC and government ought to rope in young online ‘stars’. The likes o Bhuvan Bam and YouTube sensation, the most famous Hindi stand up, Zakir Khan, could help hit the idea home to Young people better than any other famous movie actor. Two, government needs to make sure that the process of getting a voter ID made must be both easy and fast. The entire process has to be online-enabled and should require as little offline activity as possible. Three, to make sure that majority of young voters exercise their right to vote, we need to incentives voting, at least for people who are in the age bracket of 18-21, and not particularly monetary incentives. Incentives may include: some percentage off on railway tickets for certain period, recognition on social media to randomly picked voters by government and ambassadors to various government awareness schemes, and other such non mechanisms, not involving financial rewards.
The future of India is decided by its executive and legislative branch who are elected by us, each one of us. The larger the number of us becomes, better the decision would be.