Pune: The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) saw a huge increase in suggestions and objections to ward delimitation on Wednesday, a day before the deadline on Thursday. The numbers stand at 2,500, so far.Civic officials said they had not received any directive to extend the deadline.On Aug 22, PMC declared delimitation of wards for the upcoming civic polls. The delimitation included both old and merged areas. There are 41 wards, which will see election of 165 corporators.Daily suggestions and objections ranged from five to 165 at the start of the process. However, it went up drastically on Tuesday and Wednesday. The civic administration received 999 suggestions on Wednesday and 941 on Tuesday. On Wednesday evening, PMC had 2,537 objections total. Meanwhile, five out of 41 wards have not received a single suggestion or objection. The Vimannagar-Lohegaon ward (707) has received the highest number of applications to review the new demarcation.PMC officials said changes are unlikely and ward delimitation election schedule is fixed. “PMC is following the timetable given by the state election commission. The administration has not received any update about changes in the timetable, so the deadline for suggestions and objections remains Thursday,” said Prasad Katkar, head of PMC’s election department.However, citizens and members of political parties have demanded a deadline extension. They said many social workers and political workers were occupied with Ganeshostav and did not have time to study the delimitation.The opposition is to ward structures. People and politicians alike said the probability of BJP winning in core city and peth areas is high as the wards are small and high in numbers. Ultimately, more BJP corporators would be elected to PMC. On the other hand, wards are bigger in the fringe areas where NCP and NCP (SP) have a strong base. The number of these wards is less and it would adversely impact the overall count of corporators for the NCPs and Shiv Sena as well as UBT.Meanwhile, Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) received 42 suggestions and objections to its draft ward delimitation, with 32 of them submitted on Wednesday. PCMC officials said they had expected a relatively low number of responses since there have been no changes in ward formation or boundaries compared to the 2017 civic polls. Political parties were anticipating the existing structure to continue and no major objections were raised.(With inputs from Alim Shaikh)
