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Mumbai: The state government on Monday moved legislation to ensure electoral reservation quota for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in local self-governing bodies. The legislation seeks to empower the state government to take over the powers of deciding on the conduct of local self-governing bodies from the State Election Commission of Maharashtra (SECM).
SC directed State Election Commission to go ahead with conducting process of general elections wherever overdue or due and in no case such election can be delayed by six months, the statutory time limit as per present local bodies laws as enshrined in the Constitution of India.
The State Government had no other alternative, but to amend the law to extend the time limit to conduct election from present provisions of six months to one year, so that the SECM can undertake collection of empirical data for deciding the OBC reservation quota in each and every local body separately. So, now time from conducting general elections, as per present statutory provisions, is maximum six months from the date of completion of the term of local bodies.
However, there is a strong possibility that the general norm of 27% reservation for OBC will drastically change in individual local bodies depending upon the population of OBC, argues Advocate Vinod Tiwari.
If the Schedule Caste (SC), Schedule Tribes (ST) population is less in any local bodies, then OBC Reservation can be more within the upper cap of 50% limit of reservation as a whole, argued Advocate Vinod Tiwari.
For example, in Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the population of SC is 8% and ST is 1%, and if in empirical data of ward wise OBC population comes to say about 60%, then in BMC, OBC reservation can go up to 41% instead of 27% available now. While the SC & ST combined reservation is just 9% in BMC.
If now data collection is not done even within a period of six months or such extended period by virtue of the proposed amended law, the SECM has to conduct an election without any reservations for OBC as per the Supreme Court order.
Once the empirical data collection is completed, OBC reservation in Mumbai, Thane, Navi Mumbai, Pune and other municipal corporations in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) will increase drastically beyond the present limit of 27 %.
