Kolkata, Oct 28 — The polling for seven urban civic bodies in West Bengal, including the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) and Howrah Municipal Corporation (HMC), is likely to be delayed by around a month due to pending delimitation-related ward-wise rearrangement of voters, sources in the West Bengal State Election Commission (WBSEC) have said.
As per the initial schedule, polling for the seven civic bodies was expected to be held in the last week of November, with results slated for announcement in the first week of December. However, officials indicated that the voter rearrangement exercise linked to delimitation remains incomplete in quite a few wards.
According to sources in the West Bengal State Election Commission, the ward-wise voter redistribution process is still pending in around 100 wards under the KMC area and is expected to take additional time to finish. As a result, conducting the elections before the third or fourth week of December may not be feasible.
“All attempts will be made to complete the process by the third week of December so that the counting process and declaration of results can be completed before the year-end. However, by any chance if the polling is conducted in the last week of December, the results will be declared before the first week of January next year,” a WBSEC source said.
A delay in elections to the KMC and HMC would also affect polling for five other municipalities scheduled to vote simultaneously: Haldia Municipality in East Midnapore district, Dhupguri Municipality in Jalpaiguri district, Bally Municipality in Howrah district, and Kalimpong and Kurseong municipalities in the hill districts of Kalimpong and Darjeeling.
The issue was discussed at an all-party meeting convened by the WBSEC on Tuesday. Most opposition parties urged the Commission to conduct the elections using the voter lists that existed before the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, alleging that many eligible voters were excluded during the revision process.
According to sources, representatives of the Mamata All India Trinamool Congress, the CPI(M)-led Left Front, and the Congress expressed concern that a large number of voters had been dropped from the electoral rolls during the revision process.
The representatives from three political outfits claimed that during the SIR exercise names of many eligible voters were deleted from the voters’ list, with the fates of many of them hanging at the end of the Appellate Tribunals. They contended that in such a situation it would be unfair for those voters if the polling for the urban civic bodies were conducted based on the post-SIR voters’ list