The results of the Lok Sabha elections, which took place across the country in seven phases, will be declared on Thursday. The counting began at 8 am.
The counting exercise is on in over 4,000 counting centres. Election Commission officials said results are expected only by late evening.
The polls were conducted between April 11 and May 19 during which people exercised their franchise to elect 542 members of the Lok Sabha from a total of 8,049 contestants.
For the first time in Lok Sabha polls, the EC will tally vote count on Electronic Voting Machines with voter verified paper audit trail slips in five polling stations in each assembly segment of a parliamentary constituency. The entire exercise of EVM-paper trail machine matching will take an additional four to five hours.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP chief Amit Shah, Congress president Rahul Gandhi and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi are among key leaders who contested the polls.
In the 2014 elections, the BJP won 282 seats while the Congress had suffered a severe drubbing, getting an all-time low of 44 seats as against 206 it won in 2009.
