Odisha Panchayat Poll Dates To Be Announced After All-Party Meet!

Bhubaneswar: The dates for the Panchayat elections in Odisha, slated for early next year, will be announced soon after an all-party meet, the Secretary of State Election Commission (SEC) informed on Wednesday.

The meeting will be held to discuss the modalities regarding the conduct of polls.

It is pertinent to mention here that elections will have to be held by March 2022, since the term of all the Panchayati Raj institutions will be over by that time.

According to an earlier notification, polling will be held with party symbols for 853 Zilla Parishads and in 91,916 wards and 6,794 panchayats on non-party basis. Four Zilla Parishad (ZP) president posts in Angul, Khurda, Nayagarh and Sonepur districts have been reserved for OBC candidates and as many for SC candidates in Cuttack, Jagatsinghpur, Bhadrak and Jajpur districts.

The revised expenditure limit for candidates set by the SEC allows a Zilla Parishad contestant to spend up to Rs 5 lakh, while the expenditure ceiling for Panchayat Samiti member and sarpanch is now Rs 2 lakh.

According to the final draft of voters’ list published on December 4, there are 2.63 crore eligible voters, an increase of 2 lakh voters since 2017. The final voters’ list will be published on December 16.

Notably, it is for the first time that central counting will be done for the panchayat elections. Earlier, counting was done at the polling booths.