PANAJI
The State Election Commissioner, W V Ramanamurthy, IAS (Retd), has through a public notice thrown the 180-odd village panchayat wards delimitation proposals prepared by electoral registration officers (EROs) open to scrutiny and for inputs from the public from Thursday (Feb 24) to March 2.
According to Ramanamurthy, the draft delimitation proposals prepared by the EROs can be accessed and inspected by members of the public at the offices of the mamlatdars/joint-mamlatdars who were designated as EROs for the panchayats in their respective jurisdictions.
These draft delimitation proposals will be kept open from February 24 to March 2 and the general public can submit their suggestions, corrections or any modifications they want to seek of any of the wards.
Panchayat elections are due in Goa by May-June this year. Ramanamurthy had initiated the delimitation process for the panchayat wards in mid-November last year by a notification in which mamlatdars and joint mamlatdars of all talukas were designated as electoral registration officers (EROs).
The electoral roll of Goa legislative assembly elections as of January 1, 2021, was also notified as the basis to form the panchayat wards. Geographical contiguity and natural boundaries were to be the natural basis in the wards demarcation process, the notification had said.
The EROs were tasked to complete the exercise for all panchayats in their jurisdiction and furnish reports to the SEC by December 15 last year.
The EROs have also prepared ward-wise village panchayat maps and appended them to their reports.
Following this, the SEC has also conducted the task of assigning voters to each delimited ward on the basis of the electoral roll with January 1, 2022, as the qualifying date which was used for the elections to the Goa legislative assembly held on February 14.
