Orissa HC Issues Notice To SEC & State Govt Over Delay In ULB Polls

Cuttack: The Orissa High Court on Wednesday issued a notice to the state government over delay in holding the urban local body (ULB) elections.

The court has asked the chief secretary and the State Election Commission (SEC) to file their reply within four weeks. It issued the notice after hearing three separate writ petitions filed on August 12 seeking direction to the state government and the SEC for conducting the ULB polls.

The three petitioners included former bureaucrat Prasanna Mishra from Bhubaneswar, former minister and BJP leader Samir Dey from Cuttack and BJP MLA Jayant Sarangi from Puri.

Senior lawyer Pitambar Acharya appeared in the court on behalf of the petitioners. The court has fixed the next hearing of the case after 4 weeks.

While the ULB polls in Odisha have not been conducted since 2018, the SEC has assigned the cause of not holding the elections to delay in completing the delimitation and reservation exercise.

Notably, the High Court in 2018 had set aside the Odisha Municipal (Delimitation of Wards, Reservation of seats and Conduct of Elections) Amendment Rules, 2016, as reservation of seats had reached 66% against 50% limit. Although the state government had moved the Supreme Court, the latter had upheld the HC order in 2019.