Ready to conduct polls in 123 municipalities: Telangana govt to high court

HYDERABAD: The Telangana government in high court has claimed that it has completed its part of the job for taking 123 municipalities to polls and expressed readiness for polls in all municipalities at a time. All the objections raised by the people in various municipalities were heard, half of them resolved and half of them deserve no consideration because they came as mere requests and not as legal objections to the pre-poll process.
State’s municipal administration department's principal secretary Arvind Kumar said this in an affidavit filed before the high court that was hearing pleas over the state’s alleged hasty process. This state affidavit was filed in tune with a direction given by a bench of Chief Justice Raghavendra Singh Chauhan and Justice Shameem Akther.
Explaining why they chose to cut short the schedule to one month despite getting four months from the high court, Arvind said that they brought out new guidelines after repealing on old GO Ms. No 31 issued on February 1995 and brought in a new GO Ms. No 78 in its place on June 29, 2019. The new GO gave no timelines and the public consultation process was limited to municipality level only and not at the ward level, he said justifying the reduction of the time frame for public consultation. We followed the procedure in respect of delimitation, identification of voters belonging to women, SC, ST and BC categories and also in determining reservations at wards, he said. The state is interested in seeing polls conducted as per the constitutional mandate, he said urging the court to allow them to go ahead with the revised time schedule.
It can be recalled, earlier, the state election commission sought permission from the court to allow it to go ahead with the municipal polls in 69 municipalities where no complaints are pending against the pre-poll process. The State in its counter said that there are no complaints in all the 123 municipalities and wanted polls to be held in all of them simultaneously.