Paving the way for early local bodies’ elections, the Uttar Pradesh government on Thursday issued a provisional list of reserved seats for mayors of municipal corporations and chairpersons of municipal councils and nagar panchayats for the three-tier urban elections, giving one week’s time to the people and organisations to raise objections, if any.
Urban Development Minister AK Sharma said that the draft notification for reservation had been issued and uploaded in the department’s website urbandevelopment.up.nic.in.
“People have been given one week’s time to raise objections. The objections should be filed by 5 pm on April 6 at the department’s office,” the minister told reporters here on Thursday.
Elections are to be held in 17 municipal corporations, 199 municipal councils and 517 nagar panchayats. As per the new notification, of these 288 seats are reserved for women, 205 for Other Backward Classes, 110 for Scheduled Caste and two for Scheduled Tribe candidates.
The revised draft notification was issued following objections raised over OBC reservation in the first notification issued on December 5.
Interestingly, there is no change in the number of OBC seats. After the survey the reservations for women, SC and ST seats have increased in the new format. The OBC reservation in December 5 notification also stood at 205.
As per the notification of December 5 the number of seats reserved for women was 255, for SC it was 102 and for ST one seat was reserved.
“We are committed to providing reservation as per the recommendations of the commission. A canard was spread by opposition leaders that the Bharatiya Janata Party is anti-backwards and is not willing to conduct elections as per reservation. Our work is transparent. We have issued a draft notification and still if someone has objections he can raise it within a week’s time,” Sharma said.
There is a massive change in the reservation of mayoral seats. The mayor’s seats of Lucknow, Ghaziabad and Kanpur have been reserved for women while these seats were unreserved in the last notification. The Prayagraj mayoral seat has now been declared unreserved while it was earlier reserved for Backward candidate. The mayoral seats of Varanasi, Aligarh, Bareilly, Moradabad, Gorakhpur, Ayodhya and Mathura-Vrindavan have also been declared unreserved. Agra and Jhansi seats are reserved for SC candidates while Shahajahanpur, Firozabad, Saharanpurand Meerut will elect backward candidates as their mayors.
The urban local bodies elections, supposed to be the last major polls in Uttar Pradesh before the crucial 2024 Lok Sabha elections, were embroiled in a caste row even before they could be conducted.
Sharma said that early notification was issued on December 5, 2022. After this, some petitions were filed in the High Court, and the court ordered that the reservation process be investigated by forming a dedicated commission to determine the reservation for backwards.
He further said that the order of the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court came on December 27 and the state government formed a five-member dedicated commission. He said after the commission submitted its report, the same was presented before the Supreme Court and the state government assured the apex court that the process for local bodies elections would start within two days.
The Supreme Court, noting that the term of some of the urban local bodies had already expired, had allowed the Yogi Adityanath-led government to delegate financial powers to a three-member administrative body headed by the district magistrates to run these bodies temporarily.
"For the purpose of ensuring that the administrative work of the local bodies is not hampered, the government would be at liberty to issue a notification for the delegation or, as the case may be, discharge its financial powers," the SC bench said, adding that this, however, will be "subject to the caveat that no major policy decisions shall be taken by the administrative authority".
