NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court on Tuesday approved the fresh draft notification for reserving wards of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Caste women and women belonging to the general category.

Justice B.D. Ahmed directed the Delhi State Election Commission to issue the proposed notification immediately.

Seats

"The manner indicated in the present case for identifying seats for the Scheduled Castes based on the criteria of ranking seats in decreasing proportion of population and limiting them to not more than two wards per Assembly Constituency cannot be interfered with as it is neither arbitrary nor discriminatory or mala fide,'' Mr. Justice Ahmed said.

"Even the criterion for allotting every third seat from the list of wards arranged as per the serial numbers of the wards for women cannot be questioned,'' the Judge added.

The State Election Commission on Monday had submitted the fresh draft notification to the High Court for its approval on a direction by it (the Court) on a petition by Minto Road Councillor Ramesh Dutta challenging the February 17 notification for reservation of wards for the three categories.

Mr. Justice Ahmed also set aside the February 17 notification saying that "it has gone wrong in uniformly applying these criteria''.

Ruling in favour of the Commission on the issue of rotating the reserved seats, Mr. Ahmed said "there is no necessity of rotating the Scheduled Caste seats in future terms but the Union Government can do it; however, the reserved seats for women under the Scheduled Caste and general categories must be rotated''.

"The manner of such rotation must be indicated in the next term,'' the judgment added.

According to the new draft notification, 46 of the total of 272 wards are reserved for the Scheduled Castes and of these, 16 are reserved for Scheduled Caste women. Of the remaining 226 wards, every third ward is reserved for women belonging to the general category, the new draft notification says.

It further states that there are no more than two reserved wards in each Assembly constituency for the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Caste women.

Consequently, the categorisation of as many as 70 wards in the general and women in the general category has changed.

Formula

Mr. Dutta had challenged the notification alleging that the Election Commission had not adopted any formula for reserving wards for the three categories and had resorted to a pick-and-choose policy under pressure from different power lobbies.

The Court upheld his allegations.

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