Centre Issues Final Notification for Delimitation of Delhi Wards, Paving Way for Municipal Elections

The Ministry of Home Affairs on Tuesday issued the gazette notification for redrawing of municipal wards in Delhi, paving the way for civic polls in the national capital.

According to the gazette notification citing a statement dated September 10, the government has “fixed the total number of seats as 250 in the Corporation out of which 42 seats have been reserved for members of Scheduled Castes.”

According to Section 3 and Section 5 of the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act, 1957, which was amended this year (Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Act, 2022) (10 of 2022) provide for the determination of number of seats of Councillors as also the number of seats reserved for members of Scheduled Castes in the Corporation by the Central Government, it said.

“Delimitation Committee has completed its exercise with regard to preparation of the draft Delimitation order and submitted its report to the Central Government on August 12, 2022,” the notice read.

The notification came a day after the delimitation committee submitted its report to the Centre.

Municipal elections in the city are due since April this year. The polls were put on hold before Delhi State Election Commissioner S K Srivastava was to announce the schedule on March 8 due to the Centre’s plan to reunify the three civic bodies.

The BJP, which was ruling the three municipal corporations in Delhi for over a decade before their reunification, the AAP, and the Congress have already started preparation for the MCD polls.

The Ministry of Home Affairs in July this year set up a three-member panel for a fresh delimitation of the municipal wards. This panel was headed by Vijay Dev, State Election Commissioner with Pankaj Kumar Singh, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, and Randhir Sahay, Additional Commissioner, MCD.

The last elimination exercise was conducted in 2016 with 272 wards with each having an average population of 60,000 considering a variation of 10-15 per cent.

The ward boundaries are drawn on the basis of tentative EB maps of Census-2011, provided by the Directorate of Census Operations, Delhi.

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