Council elections in Maharashtra on December 10

Six seats to go to polls

The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday announced the schedule for the biennial election to the Maharashtra Legislative Council from five local authorities for six seats due to retirement of sitting members on January 1, 2022. The election will be held on December 10 and the result will be declared on December 14.

The term of eight sitting MLCs is set to expire on January 2022. However with regard to local authorities’ constituencies election, the ECI has laid down the guidelines that if at least 75% of the local authorities in the constituency are functioning and in addition at least 75% of the electors out of the total electorate are available, then electorate is treated as available for electing MLC. Based on this, only five out of seven local authorities fulfill the criteria leading to election on only six seats, instead of eight.

The seven local authorities include, Mumbai (Ramdas Kadam of Shiv Sena and Bhai Jagtap of Congress), Kolhapur (Satej Patil of Congress), Dhule-cum-Nandurbar (Amrishbhai Patel, Congress-turned-BJP), Akola-cum-Buldhana-cum-Washim (Gopikishan Bajoriya of Shiv sena), Nagpur (Girish Vyas of BJP), Solapur (Prashant Paricharak, independent) and Ahmednagar (Arunkaka Jagtap of NCP). As per the ECI, elections will not be held in Solapur and Ahmednagar.