From Our Bureau
NEW DELHI: Umakant Lakhera and Vinay Kumar were Sunday night re-elected for the second term as the president and the secretary general respectively of the Press Club of India(PCI) in a keenly contested elections with four panels in the fray, with the highest polling of 1791 votes.
In fact, their team bagged all 21 seats. Chander Shekhar Luthra, joint secretary in the outgoing team, was the giant killer, defeating Santosh Thakur of Nagpur Hindi daily, the key man who lost the elections last year too, by a margin of 11 votes.
Lakhera, a free-lance journalist, defeated the nearest rival Sanjay Basak of The Asian Age, winning the highest 898 votes as against his tally of 638. Vinay Kumar scored 827 votes as against the nearest rival Pallavi Ghosh of CNN-News 18 getting 658.
Manoranjan Bharati of NDTV was elected the vice-president, winning 878 votes as against nearest rival Pawan Kumar’s 578 votes, while Swati Mathur of The Times of India became the joint secretary, bagging 877 votes.
Those elected as managing committee members (all from Lakhera panel) are: Aadesh Rawal, Amit Pandey, Amrita Madhukalya, Anish Kumar, Kritika Sharma, Mohd Abdul Bari Masood, Manvender Vashisht, Mayank Singh Mond Mahtab Alam, Mihir Gautam, Rahul Chopra, Sangeeta Pisharoty, Shemim Joy, Telaprolu Srinivasa Rao, Vinayak Padmarao and Vineet Thakur.
