Pingla Assembly Election 2024

Pingla is located in the Kharagpur subdivision of Paschim Medinipur district. The constituency, created in 1967, is made up of seven gram panchayats of the Pingla community development block along with the entire Kharagpur II block, and is one of the seven segments under the Ghatal Lok Sabha seat. It has gone to the polls 13 times since its formation. The Congress has won the seat three times, all in a row from 1967 to 1972. The Democratic Socialist Party has also won it three times, independents have taken the seat on three occasions, the Trinamool Congress has won twice, while the Janata Party and the CPI(M) have one victory each.

In 2011, Prabodh Chandra Sinha of the DSP defeated Ajit Maity of the Trinamool Congress by 1,234 votes. The Trinamool turned the tables in 2016, when Saumen Kumar Mahapatra defeated Sinha by 24,218 votes. The party retained the seat in 2021 with Ajit Maity as its candidate. Maity beat the BJP’s Antara Bhattacharya by 6,656 votes, a margin of about 2.9 per cent, signalling the BJP’s emergence as the principal challenger.

Parliamentary election trends from the Pingla Assembly segment show a similar pattern of churn with Trinamool now on top. In 2009, the CPI led Trinamool here by 17,441 votes. Trinamool moved ahead in 2014 and has stayed in front since, leading the CPI by 25,485 votes that year. Its lead then fell sharply to 1,698 votes over the BJP in 2019, before climbing again in 2024, when Trinamool established a margin of 19,913 votes, or about 8.7 per cent, over the BJP.

Pingla had 265,243 registered voters in 2024, up from 255,054 in 2021, 244,828 in 2019, 229,666 in 2016 and 194,839 in 2011. Scheduled Tribes form the largest social group at 20.35 per cent of the electorate, Scheduled Castes account for 14.88 per cent and Muslims for 12.60 per cent. It is a purely rural constituency with no urban voters on its rolls. Voter turnout has remained high, with 92.04 per cent in 2011, 90.39 per cent in 2016, 88.12 per cent in 2019, 89.72 per cent in 2021 and 86.78 per cent in 2024.

Pingla lies in the south-western part of Paschim Medinipur, in a zone where the terrain grades from the slightly higher lateritic uplands of western Medinipur towards the flatter alluvial plains nearer the coast. The land around the Pingla and Kharagpur II block is gently undulating, with a mix of red and lateritic soils and heavier alluvial patches in low-lying areas. The area falls in the Kangsabati River basin, with the Kangsabati, also known as the Kasai, flowing through Paschim Medinipur before joining larger river systems further east. Numerous canals, distributaries and ponds provide water for irrigation and daily use and play a crucial role in the monsoon-dependent farming pattern.

Agriculture is the backbone of the local economy. Farmers grow paddy as the main crop along with oilseeds, vegetables and some cash crops in better irrigated tracts, while more marginal lands depend heavily on the rains. Many households supplement farm income through agricultural wage work, small trade, transport, construction labour and jobs in nearby industrial and service centres, such as Kharagpur and Medinipur. Seasonal migration to larger towns in West Bengal and neighbouring states is also a feature of the local livelihood pattern.

Pingla is moderately well connected by road and rail. By road, it lies about 30 to 35 kilometres from Kharagpur, the subdivision headquarters and a major railway and industrial hub. It is around 40 to 50 kilometres from Medinipur town, the district headquarters, via regional roads that also link to the Kangsabati irrigation network. The state capital, Kolkata, is roughly 110 to 115 kilometres away by road. Nearby railway stations on the Howrah-Kharagpur and Kharagpur-Tatanagar lines provide access to long-distance trains through junctions such as Kharagpur and Medinipur. Other towns in Paschim Medinipur, including Debra, Narayangarh and Sabang, and those in adjoining districts such as Jhargram, Bishnupur in Bankura and towns in coastal Purba Medinipur, fall within a wider commuting belt. Towns in neighbouring states such as Jamshedpur in Jharkhand and Baripada in Odisha are further away but reachable by combining road and rail routes through Kharagpur.

History appears to favour the Trinamool Congress, which has won two successive Assembly polls and led in all three Lok Sabha elections in Pingla since 2014. At the same time, the BJP remains very much in the race, having come close to dislodging Trinamool in both the 2019 Lok Sabha and the 2021 Assembly elections before Trinamool opened up a larger gap again in the 2024 general election. The Left Front-Congress alliance, represented here by the CPI, has slipped to under four per cent of the vote in both 2021 and 2024 and seems beyond any meaningful revival for now. The Democratic Socialist Party, once a dominant force, has merged with the Forward Bloc and could trigger internal tussles within the Left Front-Congress fold over candidate selection. Trinamool is set to enter 2026 with a slight edge, while the BJP retains a realistic chance if it can make deeper inroads into the Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste vote and if even a small revival of the Left Front-Congress alliance splits Trinamool’s Muslim support. On present trends, Pingla is headed for a close and interesting contest in the 2026 Assembly elections.

(Ajay Jha)