The chief election commissioner MMC Sharma declared the results of the PCI polls in the attendance of his team and all the contestants.
The panel led by Gautam Lahiri took a swipe winning on all posts in the Press Club of India polls which were concluded on September 24. Mr Lahiri who is a veteran journalist and has served as the President of PCI two times earlier secured 861 votes.
The former PCI president defeated his closes opponent Prashant Tondon by a big margin of 594 votes. Another contestant Manoranjan Bharti from NDTV, who secured the maximum numbers of 971 votes defeated his opponent by a margin of 768 votes to become the Vice President.
Mehtab Alam from ‘The Wire’ was elected Joint Secretary after defeating his opponent by a margin of 377 votes. While, Neeraj Thakur defeated his opponent by 529 votes winning with 812 votes.
Meanwhile, News Nation’s Mohit Dubey defeated his opponent by 483 votes and became PCI treasurer securing 692 votes.
This time there were 22 competitors for the 16 management committee posts and the Lahiri panel won all the 16 posts. As per the press release from the Press Club of India the contestants who won the 16 managing committee posts include Ashish Gupta, Abdul Bari Masaud, Shankar Kumar Anand, Mayank Singh, Ashraf Ali, Meghna Dhulia, Manvendra Vashisht, Ravindra Kumar, Vineeta Thakur, Pragya Singh, Sunil Negi, Anish Singh, Telaprolu Sriniwas Rao, Jatin Gandhi, Surabhi Kanga and NR Mohanty.
The top four in terms of vote counting from these managing committee posts were Jatin Gandhi who bagged the maximum 858 votes followed by Meghna Dhulia who won the second highest 838 votes, then Pragya Singh was third winning 821 votes and Sunil Negi fourth, who won 814 votes.
The outgoing secretary general Vinay Kumar paid gratitude to all the participants for their cooperation and support throughout the polling and previous tenure.
