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The Aam Aadmi Party has flagged several issues with the draft of the delimitation order made public earlier this month and called the exercise “politically motivated”, in a memorandum submitted to the State Election Commission on Thursday.
Delimitation was necessitated when the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (Amendment) Act was passed in Parliament. As per the amendment, the North, East and South Corporations were merged into one again. The amendment also stated that the total number of wards in MCD was to be reduced from 272 to 250.
“The Delimitation Committee was formed with a single mandate of reducing the number of wards in Delhi from 272 to 250. Your Committee was required to reduce 22 wards and the only logical way to do this was to identify those Assembly constituencies which had 4-7 wards and to reduce one ward from each of them by evenly distributing its population among the remaining wards of that Constituency. It means that if an Assembly constituency originally had 6 wards, you had to reduce it to 5 and if an Assembly constituency had 4 wards, there should be 3 wards after delimitation. They were not required to disturb any other Assembly constituency except these 22 Assembly Constituencies where one ward each was being dissolved in other remaining wards of that AC. But if you have disturbed the wards in most assembly constituencies without changing the number of wards, this process is clearly politically motivated. There were several constituencies where the number of wards were neither increased nor reduced but certain areas have been moved from one ward into another ward. The Delimitation Committee has to tell the rationale behind this move to the people of Delhi,” AAP wrote in its memorandum, which was presented to the State Election Commissioner Vijay Dev by MLAs Saurabh Bharadwaj and Durgesh Pathak.
According to the delimitation draft, there are discrepancies in the sizes of different wards – some wards like Chandni Chowk and Laxmi Nagar have a population of just over 35,000 while other wards like Mayur Vihar Phase I and Trilokpuri have over 90,000.
Around Rs 1 crore was allocated in the previous years for each ward.“The same amount of funds will be available for each ward, while the population in these wards varies from 35,000 to 90,000. This will cause a huge imbalance in the availability of development funds per capita,” AAP’s memorandum stated.
AAP said that the way delimitation had been done would further disadvantage lower income groups. “Greater Kailash-1 had a population size of 59,633 but now it has been reduced to 45,174. Whereas, Chirag Delhi which has low income groups had a population of 62,446 but it has been increased to 77,698.”
AAP, however, is not the only party claiming that the new exercise puts them at a disadvantage. BJP recently submitted its suggestions and objections related to the draft order and said that certain wards have been carved out to benefit the AAP.
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