Congress for polls in BBMP 243 wards

Hameed Ashraf | NT

Bengaluru: Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, which has been functioning without elected representatives for the past two-and-ahalf years, will soon have an elected body as Congress that promised to conduct the elections has made all preparations to hold them.

If all goes well, the party will conduct the BBMP elections to 243 wards. The Congress, which came to power in the State recently, has constituted a committee led by Transport Minister and senior Congress leader Ramalinga Reddy to study and recommend all aspects of conducting the BBMP elections.

Now, this committee has planned to submit a report to Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar, who is also Bengaluru Development Minister, by Tuesday or in another two days. According to Reddy, the committee has decided to recommend BBMP elections for 243 wards. The committee has prepared the report after consulting all stakeholders including former mayors, ward corporators and others.

“We have prepared the report, and will submit it in one or two days to the State government. We have decided to go ahead with elections for 243 wards. There are several cases in the High Court and except one, all of them have been cleared, we will see what directions we get from the court,” Reddy said.

Reddy also dismissed the proposal of increasing the ward numbers up to 250 as it is a time-consuming process as boundaries must be redrawn. He also denied the proposals on trifurcating the BBMP as no such discussion was held regarding this.

The party will abide by its decision of conducting BBMP elections as it wants the body to be administered by elected members. The committee was formed to consider proposals on whether to redo the ward delimitation or go ahead with the existing wards. Once the government receives the report, it is likely to announce the reservation of wards.

The High Court of Karnataka had earlier quashed the government order issued by the Urban Development department over the ward reservation and had asked it to redo it. A case is also pending regarding BBMP elections in the Supreme Court and is likely to come up for hearing on July 4, he said.