Delays in civic polls spotlight weak state election commissions' powers

According to a survey, 61 per cent of urban local bodies in 15 major states, including Karnataka, saw delayed civic elections

Uttarakhand concluded its civic and panchayat elections on Thursday after a delay of over a year, with vote counting scheduled for Saturday. This delay, however, pales in comparison to the postponement of elections in urban and rural local bodies across India.

 

For instance, the last elections to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation were held in 2017, and the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike completed its term in September 2020. There have been no elections held in these urban local bodies since.

 

Thirty-one years after the enactment of the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution, which gave constitutional status to local bodies, elections to these bodies, conducted by state election commissions (SECs), still do not follow a set schedule.

 

The issue of delay in holding panchayat and municipal elections has taken centre stage after the committee, led by former President Ram Nath Kovind, proposed a schedule for holding simultaneous polls. In its March 2024 report, the Kovind committee recommended a two-step approach: simultaneous polls for the Lok Sabha and the legislative Assemblies and elections to rural (256,990 gram panchayats and over 2 million rural wards) and urban (3,408 municipalities and 80,436 urban wards) bodies within 100 days of Lok Sabha and Assembly polls.

 

However, the 129th Constitutional Amendment Bill, introduced in the Lok Sabha during the winter session, proposed simultaneous elections for the Lok Sabha and legislative Assemblies but excluded panchayat and municipal elections.

 

According to the Annual Survey of India’s City-Systems by Janaagraha, a Bengaluru-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) released last year and updated until the end of 2023, 61 per cent of urban local bodies in 15 major states, including Karnataka, saw delayed civic elections.

 

The Compendium of Performance Audits on the Implementation of the 74th Amendment Act, published by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India in November 2024, stated that elections were delayed in 60 per cent of urban local governments (ULGs) across India.

 

The Janaagraha study found that even when elections are held and results announced, there is a delay of 11 months on average on the part of the state governments to operationalise elected councils. The CAG report attributed these delays to disempowered SECs, pointing out that only four of 15 states assessed had authorised their respective SECs to carry out ward delimitations. According to the survey, only 11 of 35 states and UTs have empowered SECs with ward delimitation. In the remaining 24 states, this function is vested with the state government. “Weak SECs contribute to delays in council elections,” it said.

 

The delay in ward delimitations, the CAG report noted, was both because of lackadaisical state governments and court cases challenging reservations. For example, the civic body elections to three municipal and 36 town councils in Nagaland were held over the course of 2024, two decades after the north-eastern state’s first-ever such elections in 2004, because of objections to the one-third reservation for women as provided in the 74th Amendment.

 

Article 243U, introduced in the 74th Constitution Amendment, mandates that elections to ULGs should be conducted before the expiry of their respective terms. The 73rd Constitution Amendment introduced similar provisions for elections to panchayats.

 

Articles 243ZA and 243K of the 74th Constitution Amendment mandate that “the superintendence, direction, and control of all procedures of election to the municipalities shall be vested in the state election commission (SEC)”.