Delhi Civic Polls Will Likely Be Webcast, Say Election Authorities

Election authorities have begun preparations for the civic polls in Delhi, which are due in April, and are also likely to webcast the exercise, officials said on Monday.

The State Election Commission (SEC) in Delhi in January had said that the civic polls in Delhi will be held in April 2022 and announced de-reservation of existing wards and reservation of new wards on rotation for specified categories.

The commission is likely to webcast the civic polls. This has been done in previous elections as well, such as assembly polls and Lok Sabha elections. Webcast is generally done for sensitive seats and areas to allay fears of any wrongdoing, officials said.

They said 150-200 people have been debarred from contesting civic polls this time, as they had not declared their assets information correctly in the last elections.

This is in accordance with an order issued seven-eight months back, the officials said.

Schedule of civic polls is likely to be announced in the second week of March, sources said. Delhi has three municipal corporations -- North, South and East -- and the last civic polls were held in April 2017.

While the North Delhi Municipal Corporation and the South Delhi Municipal Corporation have 104 wards each, the East Delhi Municipal Corporation has 64 wards.

All three corporations are currently ruled by the BJP, the party has been controlling all the civic bodies since the trifurcation of the erstwhile unified Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) in 2012.

In 2017 polls, the BJP had bagged 181 of 270 wards in all three civic bodies, and had managed to increase its vote share by around 5 per cent. The party's vote share was 32.2 per cent in the 2015 Assembly election.

While AAP had finished on second spot, Congress was a distant third in the elections' results tally in 2017.