Polls to 14,234 gram panchayats in Maha to be held on Jan 15

Elections to those gram panchayats whose tenure ends this month, will also be held on January 15, Madan said.There are 27,920 gram panchayatsin Maharashtra and elections to 14,234 of them means nearly 50 per cent of the village bodies would go to polls next month.

Elections to 14,234 gram panchayats spread across 34 of the total 36 districts in Maharashtra will be held on January 15. State Election Commissioner UPS Madan made the announcement on Friday.

With this, the election code of conduct came into force immediately. The counting of votes will be held on January 18, Madan said.

''Elections to 1,566 gram panchayats, whose tenure ended between April and June this year, were to be held on March 31. However, the polls were put off due to the COVID-19 pandemic,'' he said. ''Elections to those gram panchayats whose tenure ends this month, will also be held on January 15,'' Madan said.

There are 27,920 gram panchayatsin Maharashtra and elections to 14,234 of them means nearly 50 per cent of the village bodies would go to polls next month. ''Nominations would be accepted from December 23 to 30, while scrutiny would be done on December 31. The last date of withdrawal of nominations is January 4,'' he added.

The final electoral rolls will be published on December 14, he said. The local bodies polls will cover 34 districts barring Mumbai city and Mumbai suburban districts.

Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray has already announced that the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) of Shiv Sena, NCP and Congress will fight all elections together. The gram panchayat polls will be held in the wake of MVA's victory in the graduates' and teachers' constituencies in the Legislative Council elections that took place recently.

The MVA won four out of six seats, while two others were bagged by an Independent candidate and the BJP. The gram panchayat polls are being seen as a barometer to gauge the public mood in rural areas as well as the strength of the parties- the ruling alliance and the opposition BJP, political observers said.

However, the gram panchayat politics is not always in sync with that at the state level, they feel. The gram panchayat elections will be held just a year before the crucial municipal corporation polls in Mumbai, Thane, Pune, Nashik and Nagpur.

The districts and the district-wise number of gram panchayats going to polls next month are as follows: Thane (158), Palghar (3), Raigad (88), Ratnagiri (479), Sindhudurg (70), Nashik (621), Dhule (218), Jalgaon (783), Ahmednagar (767), Nandurbar (87), Pune (748), Solapur (658), Satara (879), Sangli (152), Kolhapur (433), Aurangabad (618), Beed (129), Nanded (1,015), Osmanabad (428), Parbhani (566), Jalna (475), Latur (408), Hingoli (495), Amravati (553), Akola (225), Yavatmal (980), Washim (163), Buldhana (527), Nagpur (130), Wardha (50), Chandrapur (629), Bhandara (148), Gondia (189) and Gadchiroli (362)..