Former Local Bodies Minister Manoranjan Kalia on Tuesday wrote to the Commissioner of the State Election Commission, suggesting framing of guidelines for the municipal elections to be held in Punjab in future.

Pointing to certain shortcomings felt by leaders of political parties and candidates, he has said while the notification of the election process was issued on December 8, the process of nomination of candidates was to be started the next day and the polling was to take place on December 21.

"There has always been a time span between the date of notification of the elections and the start of the election process, which was missing during the process of municipal elections recently held, giving little time to political parties to complete the finalisation of the selection of candidates", he has written.

The senior BJP leader has made another point, "Fifty per cent of the seats in the municipal corporation stand reserved for women. It means if odd number of municipal wards are reserved for women, even number of wards will be reserved for the next elections. It also implies that the delimitation of MC limit should be done after 10 years. But it has been observed that the MC delimitation is done after every five years. Its effect is that the number of reservation of wards for women shifts from odd to even numbers but the area of the ward reserved for the women by and large remains the same, which is not fair."

Kalia also points out, "Municipal wards to be declared reserved for SCs or BCs must have the maximum reserved population residing in that ward of that category. But it has been observed that there is lesser population of the reserved category in the ward reserved for SCs and BCs."

He quotes the example of Ward No. 23 of the MC, Jalandhar, classified as the general category whereas the majority of the population hails from the BC category. He has also cited the case of Ward no. 48 and 55 which have been classified in the BC category whereas the majority of population in both wards belongs to the general category.

"Similarly, Ward no. 22 has been classified in the SC category whereas the majority of the population belongs to general and BC category. It has been observed that the principle of reservation of ward on the basis of census has not been followed at all", he has pointed out while suggesting that the percentage of SCs and BCs demography prevalent in each ward of the MC should be published.

Giving specific cases of anomalies, he said vote no. 555 to 592 included in the voter list of booth No. 4 of Ward no. 70 were found to pertain to Ward no. 28 as per delimitation. He has even quoted examples of how polling booths of one family got split. "House No. WF 165, Ali Mohalla, falls in Ward no. 70 as per the recent delimitation. There are four persons residing in the house. The two votes bearing no. 980 and 1184 of booth No. 3, Ward no 70, have been correctly published in the voter list of Ward no. 70, but the other two votes of the same family have been placed in Ward no. 65 in booth no. 5 having vote no. 866 and 867. Such types of blunders would be found extensively in the voter list in MC, Jalandhar.

He says that these complaints were made to the Returning Officer of Ward no. 70 but in vain.

Another big issue that the ex-minister has taken up is that there was no facility available of casting the votes by super senior citizens having age of above 85 at their residence whereas the same was available in the recently held Lok Sabha polls held earlier in June in the same year. Kalia has urged that the State Election Commission should study the discrepancies prevalent in the five MC elections recently held.