EC team arrives, to take views from stakeholders in delimitation exercise

Guwahati: A team of the Election Commission (EC) of India headed by chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar arrived in Guwahati on Sunday evening on a three-day visit to Assam in connection with the ongoing delimitation exercise of parliamentary and assembly constituencies in the state. Assam has 14 Lok Sabha constituencies and 126 assembly segments.
Among the EC team are election commissioners Anup Chandra Pandey and Arun Goel and other commission officials. They will be in Assam till Tuesday to understand the ground reality and give a hearing to the expectations of the stakeholders and the general public regarding the ongoing delimitation exercise, a government release said.
Soon after they arrived in the city, the EC team members met the chief electoral officer of Assam, Nitin Khade, and they had detailed discussions on the exercise.
On Monday, the commission members will interact with political parties, public representatives, members of civil societies, and social organisation leaders besides meeting state administration officials, including district election officers (deputy commissioners of all districts) on Tuesday.
“The commission, apart from hearing the stakeholders on March 27, has also decided to extend the facility to the stakeholders/public for sending their suggestions/inputs till April 5, 2023, at the email IDs knbhar@eci.gov.in and brajesh@eci.gov.in for those who could not come to meet the commission team,” the release said.
The EC has been entrusted with the delimitation exercise for redrawing the territorial boundaries of the assembly and parliamentary constituencies of the northeastern state using he 2001 census figures ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The EC announced the initiation of the exercise for redrawing the boundaries of the assembly and parliamentary constituencies in Assam in December last year and the preliminary work started from January this year.
The last delimitation of the constituencies in Assam was done in 1976 based on the census figures of 1971 by the then Delimitation Commission under provisions of the Delimitation Act of 1972.