With the Bill to reunify the three municipal corporations introduced in Parliament, provisions in the Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Bill, 2022, propose a reduction in the number of councillor seats to not more than 250 from the existing 272.
BJP sources said Union Home Minister Amit Shah will, whenever the Bill is taken up for discussion in Parliament, bolster the need to reunify the Capital’s civic body by underlining the status of its “debilitated finances” based on a consolidated report that the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had asked the three civic bodies to prepare.
Mr. Shah, according to BJP sources, is likely to emphasise on “a deliberate financial crisis” the Delhi government had thrust on the three municipal corporations during the pandemic.
Sources added that the Union Home Minister is also expected to underscore the need for a unified civic body in the Capital directly under the Centre for the sake of municipal employees, who had resorted to strikes “innumerable times” demanding their salaries. It had made headlines “impacting the image of Delhi” across the world.
One-year process
Meanwhile, a senior official at the State Election Commission (SEC) said the Bill, if passed, will trigger a fresh delimitation of wards “by default”, adding that it will take “at least one year to complete the exercise.”
“While the precedent has been that the SEC conducts the delimitation exercise, the Centre will decide on who carries out the exercise. There is no provision in the Act that says only the SEC can carry out the exercise. The exercise will take at least one year to complete, it is a complex process of fixing the ward boundaries. If the Bill is passed, elections can be conducted only for the newly constituted house. If the intention was to delay the polls, this development fits right into that,” said the senior SEC official.
The Bill states the word “government” shall be substituted with “Central government” in 11 sections of the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act, 1957, wherever it occurs.
‘Correcting past wrongs’
Sources in the BJP said the party was preparing to undertake a year-long exercise aimed at “correcting past wrongs” when it came to civic works in the city. These would initially include paying pending salaries, especially of municipal employees at unauthorised colonies, sprucing up municipal parks and the construction of more schools and dispensaries.
“The party hopes to chalk out the way forward in terms of which projects and tasks to complete in what order after the actual number of civic wards is known. We hope to do so well before the term(s) of the existing three municipal bodies expire in May,” a senior leader from the party’s State unit said.
“We also expect a significant bureaucratic shake up in Delhi over the coming days with many appointments to senior posts, including a special officer who will be put in-charge of the unified body for the foreseeable future or for a year at least,” said another senior Delhi BJP leader.
Through the Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Bill, 2011 — based on which the erstwhile Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) was trifurcated in 2012 — the Delhi government was empowered to decide matters such as total number of seats of councillors, division of the area of corporations into zones and wards and more.
Parallel government
According to a senior civic official, the latest Bill will empower the Centre to decide on these matters. “The Bill also does away with the director of local bodies, which is basically a middle man between the Delhi government and the corporations. In simple words, while this Bill empowers the Central government, it also creates a parallel government that is equal to the Delhi government and is run by the Centre,” said the senior civic official.
“Notwithstanding anything contained in this Act, the Central government may, if necessary, appoint a person to be called special officer, to exercise the power and discharge the functions of the corporation until the date on which the first meeting of the corporation is held after the commencement of the Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Act, 2022,” the Bill stated.
