WB panchayt polls: TMC leads in 13 of 17 districts

Initial trend shows, TMC was leading in Cooch Bihar, Dakhin Dinajpur in North Bengal in terms number of gram panchayts won

Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress seems to be on its way of sweeping the rural poll in West Bengal, as the party was leading in 13 of the 17 districts in bagging the gram (village) panchayts, while Left and Congress were leading in two districts each.

The initial trend shows, apart from 10 of the 11 districts of South Bengal (except Murshidabad), TMC was leading in Cooch Bihar and Dakhin Dinajpur in North Bengal in terms number of gram panchayts won.

CPI-M -led Left Front, on the other hand, was leading in Jalpaigudi and Malda and Congress was leading in Murshidabad and North Dinajpur.

Till 2 pm, of the total of 3,215 gram panchayats in state, TMC bagged 593, while Left and Congress won 277 and 175 respectively.

The manual counting of ballots is currently going on for gram panchayat seats for the three-tired Panchayt system. Following this counting would begin for Panchayat samiti and zilla (district) parishads.

In 2008 Panchayt election,  Left had bagged 13 of the 17 zilla (distric) parishads, while the Trinamool and Congress had two each under their belt.

After months of dilly-dally, the rural poll in the state took place in  five phases on July 11 (Purulia, Bankura and West Midnapore); 15 (East Midnapore, Hooghly and Burdwan); 19 (Howrah, South and North 24 Parganas) 22 (Nadia, Murshidabad, Malda and Birbhum) and 25 (Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri, Uttar Dinajpur and Dakshin Dinajpur).