Delhi ward delimitation report to be submitted to Centre next week

The final report will be sent to the home ministry for approval next week, the state election commission officials say. The objections have also been forwarded to the central government for considerations.

The panel tasked with redrawing the boundaries of Delhi’s civic wards is likely to submit its report to the Union home ministry next week, said officials aware of the matter, a significant step towards municipal elections being held in the Capital.

A file photo of the Civic Centre in New Delhi. (HT Archive)

The panel has prepared a draft report, which cuts the number of wards in Delhi to 250 from 272, and suggests that the number of municipalities be reduced in 23 assembly constituencies, most of which are in North and South Delhi areas.

The report was released for feedback from the public on September 13, and the panel has since then received 1,743 suggestions and objections.

Each entry was considered in detail, said officials of the panel.

“All these suggestions and objections have also been sent to the Union ministry of home affairs while the panel has started disposing them off at its level. The panel is meeting every two or three days to take up more cases and field teams are checking the geographical discrepancies in the wards,” an SEC official said.

Another official linked with the delimitation exercise said, “All the representations have been sorted assembly constituency-wise, ward-wise and at zonal levels using a sorting software. These objections cannot be seen in isolation, as a suggestion about the boundaries of one ward will also impact the neighbouring wards. A ward cannot be located outside an assembly constituency and all changes have to be carried out at the assembly level.”

Polls to the erstwhile North, East and South MCDs were scheduled to take place in April, but were indefinitely postponed in March after the Centre decided to unify the three MCDs.

Delhi currently has 272 municipal wards. Under the trifurcated MCDs, these were split between the North (104), South (104) and East (64) civic bodies.

The delimitation panel is headed by former chief secretary Vijay Dev and was constituted by the Union home ministry on July 8, 2022. The ministry, in September, notified that the city will have 250 wards with 42 seats reserved for members of Scheduled Caste communities.

Opposition parties have criticised the report and called it “politically motivated” and underlined a disparity in the population of wards, and about some areas within a ward not being included in the boundaries of the wards.

Besides, disposal of the 1700 objections, the state election commission is also undertaking a parallel process of verifying the status of enumeration blocks across the wards through EROs election registration officers. Enumeration block is a smallest constituent unit of people adopted for the census. “The purpose of demarcating all the blocks it is to ensure coverage of all areas in a ward without omission or duplication,” said the official. The redrawing of boundaries has been carried out as per the 2011 census and many changes in terms of population growth and migration of voters would have occurred in the intervening period.

Meanwhile, several functionaries in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which governed the civic bodies before they were unified, have indicated that an early election may be held in December.

A delegation of Delhi BJP functionaries, which was sent to Himachal Pradesh to help the party’s assembly poll preparations in the state, has been called back.

“We have been called back and tasked with the preparation of BJP president JP Nadda’s address to party workers and booth heads in Ramlila Maidan on October 16. Elections are likely to be held in December and this may very well be the beginning point for this poll preparation,” a senior party functionary said.