It is a mix of the old and the young in the poll fray in the national capital which will witness three septuagenarians and six candidates below 30 years fighting for a place in the next Lok Sabha.
When all parties are busy wooing young voters, the age profile of 160 candidates in the capital shows that the BSP has fielded younger men compared to the other parties.
According to Election Commission data, about one-third of the candidates (50) are in the age bracket of 30-40 years, followed by 48 in the 40-50 years group. There are 29 in the 50-60 years bracket and 21 in the 60-70 year group.
Three persons in their seventies are fighting the election this time with two -- Rashtrvadi Sena's Sita Ram Sharma (77) and United Women Front's Shahida Parveen (70) -- contesting from Chandni Chowk.
The third in the septuagenarian club, the BJP candidate from North-East Delhi B L Sharma Prem, is the oldest among the candidates at 79 years.
The youngest among the lot is an independent candidate Mantu (26), a Class VIII pass, who is taking on the might of Congress' Ajay Maken (45) and BJP's Vijay Goel (54) in the high-profile New Delhi constituency.
The New Delhi seat has four candidates below the age of 30 while 27 out of a total of 40 candidates in the seat are below 50 years. The data also throws interesting facts about the average age of contestants of three major parties fighting in the capital.
Mayawati-led BSP has younger candidates with its contestants having an average age of 44.71 years compared to Congress' 53.42 years and BJP's 58.71 years. The oldest BSP candidate Deepak Bharadwaj, also the richest in Delhi with assets worth Rs 603 crore, is 58 years old while all other party candidates are less than 50 years.
Congress' youngest candidate is Sandeep Dikshit (East Delhi) who is 44 years while BJP's youngest is Vijender Gupta who is one year older than Dikshit. There are 21 candidates who are between 60 and 70 years which include Congress' Kapil Sibal (60) and J P Aggarwal (64) and BJP's Jagdish Mukhi (66) and Chetan Chouhan (61).
In the 50-60 years club, the prominent are Krishna Tirath, Mahabal Mishra and Ramesh Kumar (all Congress) and BJP's Meera Kanwaria and Vijay Goel.