Dates announced for TN rural body polls

CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu will hold on Dec.27 and Dec.30 the elections to rural local bodies, which were originally due in 2016.

The State Election Commission on Monday announced that the civic polls will be held in two stages.

Stateelectioncommissionerr.palaniswamysaid the votes will be counted on Jan.2. Palaniswamy said the date of election for the urban local bodies will be announced later.

Indirect elections to Mayors and Municipality Chairmen will be held on Jan.11, he said.

“Filing of nominations will begin on Dec.6. The last date is Dec.13. The nominations will be scrutinised on December 16 and the last date for withdrawal is Dec.18.” The 331,000 voters — including 167,000 women — in the rural areas will elect 106,000 ward members in rural local bodies and 12,524 Panchayat presidents. Nearly 518,000 officials will be deployed in the entire exercise, Palaniswamy said.

The SEC said paper ballot method will be followed in Grama Panchayat elections. With the announcement of elections, the Model Code of Conduct has come into effect.

The state’s principal opposition Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), meanwhile, approached the Supreme Court on Thursday seeking a direction to the government to complete the delimitation delimitation, reservation and rotational process of wards in five new districts. On Monday, the court agreed to hear the plea on Dec.5 (Thursday).

This is taking into consideration that five new districts carved out in the State recently.

The DMK in its application before the Apex stated that delimitation, reservation and rotation process and completion of formal legal requirements were necessary to ensure free and fair elections.

Party chief MK Stalin said the move was aimed at ensuring that the civic body poll was conducted as per court guidelines.

“In the past three years, the government created as much confusion as possible to avoid holding local body elections. But it is now blaming us for the delay,” Stalin said while interacting with the media at the party headquarters.

However, the Supreme Court, based on an undertaking given by the State Election Commission, has ordered the notification of the elections before December 13.

The ruling Anna DMK and the DMK have started the process of receiving applications from aspiring party members to contest in the civic polls.

The local body polls, held last in 2011, were not conducted as per schedule in 2016 in the state for over three years due to various reasons. The Supreme Court has already mandated early conduct of the polls.