Close to 125 teams, comprising over 250 employees of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, will be part of the physical verification exercise for the delimitation of municipal wards in the Capital, sources familiar with the development said on Monday.
They said that on-field exercise will take place after the ongoing documentation process of redrawing ward boundaries is completed while the physical verification is “only a week-long exercise”.
“The maps provided by Geospatial Delhi Limited (GSDL) are currently being used for the documentation exercise. However, we cannot start the physical verification till the documentation exercise is completed since the employees will be given updated maps,” sources said.
Previously, the sources highlighted that the delimitation exercise was on a “fast track mode” given the tedious nature of the exercise which is to be completed in a short period of time.
‘No scope of extension’
“Till now, there seems to be no scope for extension in the deadline to complete the exercise. The Centre has given us a task and we simply need to complete it,” said another source.
The delimitation committee, which was constituted by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on July 8, is required to complete the exercise and submit its report within four months from the date of its constitution. The three-member committee is led by State Election Commissioner Vijay Dev.
According to the sources, work on Assembly constituencies in South Delhi is currently under way while the focus is to ascertain constituencies that have more than three wards.
On July 26, The Hindu had reported that the exact number of seats to be carved out of the exercise has been fixed at 250.
“The MHA guidelines for the exercise state that each constituency will be divided into a minimum of three wards. So, the constituencies which have more wards will likely see a merger of smaller wards, in order to reduce the total wards from 272 to 250. While the average population per ward will be roughly around 65,000, a deviation of plus or minus 10% is still allowed,” sources said.
The need for the delimitation exercise arose after the Central government notified the Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Act, 2022, which proposed the merger of the three erstwhile municipal corporations and a reduction in the number of councillor seats to “not more than 250” from the existing 272.
