KOCHI: Fresh faces will grace the corporation this time too. Out of the 74 councillors who were elected to the Kochi Corporation in the local body election, 41 are newbies. This time, however, the number is less as compared to the last council which had 47 fresh faces including former deputy mayor B Bhadra, former works standing committee chairman and present mayor probable Soumini Jain along with many others.
“The number may have been around 50 to 55 if both the parties would have fielded fresh candidates in the election. The parties had been outgoing in fielding fresh faces in the 2010 election, but this time around the trend was not so marked leading to a drop in the number of freshers,” said M Anilkumar, former councillor of LDF.
Of the new faces 19 contested under LDF banner while UDF has 20. Interestingly, the two rebels from both the parties- Geetha Prabhakaran(LDF) and Seenath Rasheed(UDF) also got elected to the council from Nambyapuram and Kalvathy divisions respectively.
Another point of interest is that out of the 41 newbies, majority of them are women councillors with a strength of 23. The men councillors are just 18. Of them Shyny Mathew of UDF and Gracey Babu Jacob of UDF have included in the mayor probable list, besides Soumini Jain.
But the council won’t have a dearth of experienced hands. There are 15 sitting councillors including UDF’s Thampi Subramanian, Minimol V K, Soumini Jain, K R Premakumar, Gracy Joseph, Ashraf T K (sharaf), T J Vinod, M B Mulaleedharan, Deleena Pinhero and LDF’s Sunila Selvan, Benadict Fernandes (Benny), P S Prakash and C D Valsalakumari.