Tourists ride shikaras at Dal Lake in Srinagar, Monday, April 11, 2022.
Highlights
- The Delimitation Commission for Jammu and Kashmir was set up in March 2020
- The panel would make public its 'award' detailing the number of constituencies and their size
- The commission has proposed increasing the number of seats in the UT from 83 to 90
A Delimitation Commission, mandated to redraw the boundaries of assembly and parliamentary constituencies of Jammu and Kashmir, is likely to submit the final draft today.
The completion of the exercise will pave the way for holding elections in the Union Territory. This would be the first election in the UT since J&K's special status under Article 370 was scrapped and bifurcated into two Union Territories by the Modi government in August 2019.
The Delimitation Commission for Jammu and Kashmir headed by Justice (retired) Ranjana Prakash Desai will meet at the Election Commission of India office in Delhi. Chief Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra and the state Election Commissioner of Jammu and Kashmir are also members of the panel.
The panel was set up in March 2020. It was granted a one-year extension last year. In February, it was given a two-month extension to complete its task. Its term was to otherwise end on March 6.
The panel would make public its 'award' detailing the number of constituencies and their size by bringing out a gazette notification after the report is submitted to the government. The gazette notification is likely to be issued today itself.
While the report will be a much more detailed document, the award will deal with basic details such as the number of constituencies and their size.
The commission has proposed increasing the number of seats in the UT from 83 to 90. Besides, there are 24 seats in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) which continue to remain vacant.
For the first time, nine seats have been proposed for Scheduled Tribes. The panel has also proposed six additional seats for Jammu and one for Kashmir. As of now, the Kashmir division has 46 seats and the Jammu division 37.
The last delimitation panel took seven years to give its award in 1995 while this commission took little over two years to complete its task despite the pandemic.
