The Telangana High Court Monday gave three weeks to the state government to respond to a petition challenging the delimitation process of municipal wards in local body elections, including in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), on the basis of “voters enrolled” and not as per the “population-based delimitation” as mentioned in the Constitution.
The division bench of Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh and Justice G M Mohiuddin was hearing a petition that “questioned section 6 of Telangana Municipal Act 2019 as being in teeth of Article 243 S of the Constitution of India and Section 8 B of the Delimitation Act 2002,” both of which mandates population-based delimitation.
Advocate Barkat Ali Khan, appearing for the petitioner Syed Saleem, contended that the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) was not carrying out the mandate of a government order dated November 6, 1996, GO 570, issued under the Hyderabad Municipal Corporation Act, 1955, dealing with delimitation of the municipal wards.
The government order, which is still in use, mandates population-based delimitation and equal as per the census average. The rule 5 of the government order mandates that the population of each ward should be close to the “average population” for the entire municipal body and in case of any unforeseen situation, a variation of up to 10 percent from this average as margin is given.
According to the petitioner’s counsel, GHMC with a population of 74 lakh as per 2011 census should have 49,000 to 54,000 voters in each ward. But the delimitation of wards in GHMC has been done in a way that one ward has 78,000 voters and another has only 28,000 voters, and thereby, 117 of the 150 wards have recorded violations, as per the petition.
The GHMC elections in 2016 and 2020 were conducted under such a delimitation process and the petitioner feared that GHMC election scheduled for February 2026 may be advanced to this year and conducted the same way as in 2016 and 2020.
During the hearing, the counsel for the petitioner referred to provisions under section 5(1) of the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act, 1957, section 32 A of the Uttar Pradesh Municipal Corporation (Adi niyam) 1959, section 10 (3) of the Madhya Pradesh Municipal Corporation Act 1956, section 6 of the Arunachal Pradesh Municipal Corporation act and section 8(1) of the Punjab Municipal Corporation Act 1976, all of which treat “the population as the determinative criteria for delimitation of such wards”.
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In the order, the bench said, “It is submitted that Section 6 of the Act of 2019 instead uses the expression ‘Voters’. Therefore, the petitioner has laid this challenge. He submits that the elections to the local bodies are being conducted under the impugned provision without proper delimitation of the constituency which gives rise to great variation in the constituencies of each ward.”
The matter has been posted for hearing after three weeks.
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