The Hindu : New Delhi News : BJP finds anomalies in Delimitation Commission proposals

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 22, 2005

New Delhi

New Delhi

BJP finds anomalies in Delimitation Commission proposals

Staff Reporter

Factors like natural boundary, equal distribution of population and adjusting of people in one area neglected

NEW DELHI: The battle for wresting control of Delhi's political map seems to be gathering momentum with the Delhi unit Bharatiya Janata Party alleging grave irregularities in the proposed delimitation of State Assembly constituency by the Delimitation Commission.

It has accused the Commission of neglecting the basic principles of delimitation and fixing the seats in an arbitrary manner.

At a joint press conference here on Tuesday, the chairman of the BJP Delimitation Committee, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, the Delhi unit president, Harsh Vardhan, and the convenor of the sub-committee, Sahib Singh Chauhan, said the Delimitation Commission had taken Delhi as a single district whereas it was a State with a huge population. Factors like natural boundaries, equal distribution of population and the basic provision of delimitation regarding adjusting the people of one area in one constituency had been neglected. "By dividing many wards of the Municipal Corporation into many parts, the different Assembly constituencies have been divided resulting in the wards becoming irrelevant."

Mr. Malhotra said that after several meetings on the proposals regarding the delimitation of the 70 Delhi Assembly seats, a lot of irregularities and shortcomings have been found. It has now been decided to take up a seat-wise discussion on the proposed delimitation.

The BJP committee will apprise the Chairman of the Delimitation Commission of all its objections with the request that it should seriously consider the points raised and resolve them.

Prof. Malhotra said the basic principle of delimitation was to ensure that at the time of fixing the Assembly seats, the natural and fixed boundaries, infrastructure boundaries intensive population concentration, geographical boundaries were taken into consideration. The fixation of Delhi Assembly constituencies of Gandhi Nagar, Shahdara, Wazirpur, Tri Nagar, Shakur Basti and Model Town has been done neglecting the basic provisions of the Public Representative Law.

Population norms ignored

At present, the total population of Delhi is 1.38 crores. If this population is equally divided among 70 Assembly constituencies, then the average population comes to 1.97 lakh per constituency. On the basis of the Delimitation rules, this equal population may be increased or decreased by 10 per cent in view of the convenience of the general public in exercising their franchise and geographical boundaries.

If this average population is increased by 10 per cent then it comes to 217,650 and if this average population is decrease by 10 per cent then it comes to 178,078.

He said in fixing the population the aforesaid norm has not been taken into consideration.

For example, the population of Mustafabad 218,268, Seemapuri (R) 218.067, Nand Nagri 218,397, Nangloi Jat (R) 218,594 and Madipur (R) 2,19,526 has been fixed for the new Assembly seats. These seats have been fixed in violation of the limit of 10 per cent increase in population.

Similarly examples of violating the limit of 10 per cent decrease in fixing the seats are Chhatarpur 163,711, Mehrauli 173,291, Ambedkar Nagar (R) 173,133, Bijwasan 176,154 and Hauz Khas 174,633 which are new Assembly seat

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

New Delhi