HP govt indulging in malpractices for Panchayat, local polls:

Himachal BJP president Satpal Singh Satti today accused the state government of reserving the wards for Panchayati Raj and urban local bodies in an "illegal and arbitrary" manner to benefit its own people and warned that the party would move the court against wrong actions of the government.
"With defeat staring at the face in Panchayat and urban local bodies polls, the government is indulging in malpractices andtaking illegal and arbitrary actions to benefit its own men in the polls but the BJP would not let it happen and would move the Court," he said in a statement issued here today.

The government spent lakhs of rupees in preparing a software for conducting the polls in an orderly and transparent manner, but now it is depending on manual reservation of wards, which was fraught of the danger of being manipulated, he alleged.
Satti said that the reservation and demarcation of wards should have been on the basis of population, but the government had adopted the "lottery system" for the same which has vitiated the entire election process.
He alleged that it was an irony that while the entire country was fast moving towards digitalisation, Himachal had taken a retrograde step, obviously to "manipulate and misuse" the process.