MUMBAI: Urban and rural body polls, including the BMC election, may be delayed beyond October with governor B S Koshyari issuing ordinances scrapping the existing delimitation being carried out in municipal corporations, zilla parishads and panchayat samitis in the state. “The process of delimitation and the draw for reservations and finalisation of electoral rolls will have to be redone and will take at least three months,” said a senior official from the State Election Commission.
By now, the delimitation process for 23 municipal corporations had been completed or was in the process of being completed but will now have to be redone. The corporations where the ongoing delimitation has been scrapped include the BMC, Thane, Navi Mumbai, Kalyan-Dombivli, Ulhasnagar, Vasai-Virar, Pune, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Solapur, Kolhapur, Nashik, Akola, Amravati, Nagpur, Aurangabad, Nanded, Mira-Bhayandar, Malegaon, Panvel, Latur and Chandrapur.
The delimitation exercise was scrapped in 50 zilla parishads and their panchayat samitis where the process had either been completed or was ongoing. Last week, the Shinde government reversed the MVA government decision to up the number of wards in the city. It reduced them again from 236 to 227. It also reduced the number of seats in ZPs to 50-75 from 55-85.
