By Bizodisha Bureau, Bhubaneswar, March 19, 2019: The Congress on Tuesday announced its first list of candidates for six Lok Sabha and 36 Assembly constituencies in Odisha. However, it could not finalise the names for eight assembly seats going to polls in the first phase.

Odisha has y 21 Lok Sabha including three reserved for the members of Scheduled Castes in Bhadrak, Jajpur, and Jagatsinghpur, while five are reserved for those belonging to Scheduled Tribes in Sundargarh, Keonjhar, Mayurbhanj, Nabarangpur, and Koraput.

The state has 147 Assembly seats. There will be simultaneous polls for the Lok Sabha and Assembly in four phases from April 11 to April 29. The result will be declared on May 23.

The Congress’s list came a day after the ruling Biju Janata Dal released its list of nine candidates for six Lok Sabha and 54 assembly seats.

The party renominated tribal leader Pradeep Majhi from Nabarangpur and Bhakta Charan Das from Kalahandi Lok Sabha constituency respectively. Both had contested unsuccessfully in the 2014 election.

The opposition party fielded four new faces for Sundargarh, Bargarh, Kandhamal and Berhampur parliamentary seats. For Sundargarh Lok Sabha seat, George Tirkey will be the party’s candidate while in Bargarh, Congress chose Pradeep Debata. In Kandhamal and Berhampur Lok Sabha seats, Manoj Kumar Acharya and V Chandrasekhar Naidu will contest the Lok Sabha election 2019.

However, there was a widespread resentment among members after the Congress failed to announce the name of any candidate for the Koraput Lok Sabha constituency and eight of the 28 assembly seats that are going to polls in the first phase on April 11.

Kotpad, Laxmipur, Rayagada, Paralakhemundi, Umerkote, Bhawanipatna, Narla and Chhatrapur assembly constituencies will vote in the first phase.

Though Congress president Rahul Gandhi had promised during his visit to Odisha this month that the party would give preference to women candidates, the Congress list had just one woman.

On Monday, the BJD had given tickets to at least 13 women in the first list for the 63 assembly and Lok Sabha seats.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is yet to announce its list of candidates for any of the phases.