SEC for early delimitation of municipal wards

With less than two-and-a-half years left for the civic body polls in Delhi, the State Election Commission (SEC) has urged the Delhi Government and the Union Home Ministry to ensure that delimitation exercise of municipal wards was carried out along with the on-going exercise for the Lok Sabha and Assembly seats in the Capital.

Arguing that the delimitation exercise for municipal wards should be completed at least six months (September 2006) before the scheduled civic body elections in March 2007, the State Election Commissioner, M.P. Tyagi, in a letter to both the Union Home Ministry and the Delhi Government has suggested that the delimitation exercise be carried out from the bottom and not from the top as was being done now.

As per the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act, 1957, the municipal wards need to be delimited after every Census. The Delhi Lieutenant-Governor is the competent authority to get the delimitation done.

“Delimitation of municipal wards on the basis of Lok Sabha seats and Assembly segments results in practical difficulties. We have still not been able to solve the problems of the previous delimitation exercise which was carried out in the 1990s,” he said. “Delimitation from top to bottom creates severe problems in physical demarcation of a large number of wards. So, we have suggested a bottom to top approach,” he said.

Mr. Tyagi in his communication has suggested a few options for the “speedy and timely” executing of the delimitation exercise. “This could be done either by the SEC, as it is an impartial and independent constitutional body or by some another independent agency or by an official as was the case in the previous delimitation exercise,” Mr. Tyagi said.

Referring to the provisions of the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act, the SEC has urged that there was need to hurry up the exercise as this should be completed at least before the September 2006 because the Commission required a time of at least six months to prepare the electoral rolls, identify polling stations and make other necessary infrastructure for the March 2007 MCD elections.

Delimitation of municipal wards, Mr. Tyagi said would also remove the existing anomalies in the present set-up. While some wards are too big to manage, many are very small. Because of the fast expansion of the city and massive migration of people from various parts of the country to Delhi, several areas of the city have become overpopulated and there was need to give fair representation.

Given that the Capital has a population of nearly 140 lakhs, there should be more than one lakh people residing in each of the 134 wards of the MCD. However, as of now, while wards like Beadonpura have a population of about 50,000, several like Badarpur the figure touches nearly 2.8 lakhs.

Prominent among the wards having more than two lakh population include Uttam Nagar (2.3 lakhs), Kanjhawala (2.6 lakhs) and Rohini (2.6 lakhs) in Outer Delhi, and Karawal Nagar (2.5 lakhs) in East Delhi. The small wards, on the other hand, are Minto Road (56,000), Ballimaran (57,000), Chandni Chowk (51,000), Sadar Bazaar (55,000) and Paharganj (59,000).