Kolkata, Nov 13 (PTI) A fresh legal challenge to the delimitation of municipal wards in West Bengal has reached the Calcutta High Court, with a CPI(M) leader filing a petition against the restructuring of wards in the Howrah Municipal Corporation (HMC), days after a similar dispute over Kolkata’s civic boundaries stalled the municipal election process in the city.
The petition, filed by Imtiaz Ahmed, a former mayor-in-council member of the HMC and the CPI(M)’s candidate from the Howrah-Madhya Assembly constituency in the recently concluded state elections, challenges the process through which the number of wards in the civic body was increased from 50 to 68.
The petitioner alleged that the exercise was not conducted in accordance with the prescribed legal procedures and norms laid down in the HMC Act.
Ahmed, himself a high court lawyer, contended that the alleged procedural irregularities could lead to legal complications similar to those surrounding the delimitation of wards in the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC).
“There is no elected board at the HMC since 2018, and the civic board is being run by back-to-back administrators. There are major complications involved in the initial merging of the civic body with the adjacent Bally municipality in 2015 and their subsequent demerging in 2021. Under the circumstances, the delimitation notice seems to be bad in law,” Ahmed said.
The matter is likely to come up for hearing next Tuesday, sources said.
The development comes amid uncertainty over the civic elections in Kolkata, following an interim order by the high court restraining the announcement of the poll schedule.
Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari has announced the state government would challenge the high court order in the Supreme Court and has also floated the proposal of appointing coordinators to run the two civic bodies in the absence of elected boards, a suggestion subsequently echoed by state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya.
The latest petition comes against the backdrop of the legal battle over the KMC’s ward delimitation, under which the number of wards was increased from 144 to 209.
Opposition parties had questioned the legality of the exercise, alleging that the redrawing of ward boundaries had not followed the requisite norms.
On November 6, a division bench of Justices Sabyasachi Bhattacharyya and Arjun Ray Mukherjee restrained the State Election Commission from announcing elections to the KMC on the basis of the September 11 delimitation notification until the pending legal challenge before a single bench was disposed of.
The bench directed the single judge hearing the matter to expedite its disposal, with the next hearing scheduled after four weeks. PTI SMY MNB
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