Andhra Pradesh Assembly elections 2024: YSRCP announces candidates for all 175 seats, details inside

The Election Commission of India announced 7-phase polls scheduled for Lok Sabha elections across the country on Saturday, March 16. The polls for all 543 parliamentary constituencies will be held between April 19 and June 1.

Apart from Andhra Pradesh, Assembly elections will also be held in Odisha, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh alongside the Lok Sabha polls.

The candidates for 24 out of 25 Lok Sabha seats and 175 Assembly constituencies in the state were announced by the ruling YSRCP at the YSR memorial in Idupulapaya in Kadapa district in the presence of party chief and CM Jagan Mohan Reddy.

Bapatla MP Nandigam Suresh read out the names of the 24 candidates for the Lok Sabha elections while the state revenue minister D Prasada Rao did so for the Assembly polls.

Out of the 175 candidates for the Assembly seats, 29 are from the SC community, seven (ST), 48 (BC), and 91 (OC), along with 19 women candidates, Rao added.

CM Jagan Mohan Reddy is slated to contest the polls from the Pulivendula seat, while Dharmana Prasada Rao has been fielded from Srikakulam, Reddy Shanthi from Pathapatnam, Vasupalli Ganesh from Visakhapatnam South, Kammila Kannaparaju from Visakhapatnam North and Adari Anand from Visakhapatnam West.

According to a note from the Chief Minister's Office (CMO), 77% or 153 of all the contestants, both Assembly and Lok Sabha, are graduates, while 58 are post-graduates and six doctorates.

The YSRCP candidates list includes 17 doctors, 15 lawyers, 34 engineers, five teachers, two former bureaucrats, one defence personnel and a journalist.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has formed an alliance with the N. Chandrababu Naidu-led Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Pawan Kalyan's Jana Sena Party for the Assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh and the Lok Sabha polls.

With this, the state of Andhra Pradesh is expected to witness a two-way contest between the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the YSRCP.

In the last Assembly polls in 2019, YSRCP registered a landslide victory, winning 151 out of 175 seats in the state and restricting the then-in-power Telugu Desam Party to just 23 seats. The Jana Sena Party ended up with one seat, while parties like Congress, BJP and others couldn't open their account in the state.

In 2019, the YSRCP secured a 49.95% vote share, while TDP got 39.17% votes.