NEW DELHI: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Thursday raised multiple objections to the draft report by the delimitation commission to the Delhi State Election Commission (SEC) and flagged alleged discrepancies in the number of electorates in different municipal wards.
The party demanded equal distribution of the wards and asked that the civic polls must be held at the earliest. The AAP delegation comprising of Saurabh Bharadwaj, Durgesh Pathak and Adil Khan visited the SEC and submitted a memorandum carrying party’s objections to the draft delimitation order. The delimitation committee was set up by the Centre to re-carve municipal wards in Delhi. It had notified its draft order earlier this month, seeking feedback from political parties and the public.
In the memorandum, the party noted the delimitation committee has re-carved most of the wards without changing their number in respective assembly constituencies. “The AAP delegation raised the grievances of the people of Delhi with respect to the delimitation committee report which mainly revolved around altering of demographics due to disparity of population and the wards with large population, leaving them susceptible to mis-governance and poor development,” the AAP said.
Party’s leaders said the AAP delegation raised the concerns before the authorities with regard to the “illogical” re-carving of the municipal wards by the delimitation commission. “We had two major concerns on the recommendations of the committee. Some of the newly created wards have a population around 90,000 while the others only have a population of 30,000. Every ward gets the same amount of funds. This will create a problem in governing wards with a larger population,” said Pathak.
“Secondly, they have created island type of areas which are completely cut off from their main wards and landlocked by another ward from all directions. There are also some discrepancies related to the names of the wards as well,” he added.
Bhardwaj said that the delimitation committee has to tell the citizens the rationale behind this move.
“We suggested that every ward should have a uniform population so that the elected councillors are best placed to serve the citizens of their constituency,” he added.
According to officials, the SEC has taken the population data of 2011 census as its benchmark for delimitation. As per which, Delhi’s population size totals up to 1,64,18,663, meaning 250 wards of Delhi should have an average population size of 65,674.
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