Panchayat polls will be completed before 05 Nov: RMDD Minister

NO NEED YET TO POSTPONE RURAL BODY ELECTIONS

AMEET OBEROI
GANGTOK, 29 Aug: Dismissing speculations that the Panchayat elections will be postponed beyond the expected schedule of sometime in October, senior government officials inform that there is no question of postponing the panchayat elections and that there is ample time for the required amendments concerning the reservation percentage of the Scheduled Tribe communities in the state to be completed in time.
Confirming this, RMDD Minister CB Karki, when contacted, said that the panchayat elections should be held within the projected time-frame.
“The first panchayat meetings of the new term panchayats are due to be held on or before 05 November, 2012, so the elections should be held before that,” he said. He also said that the State government has not yet taken any decision to postpone the elections and was trying to hold the elections as per schedule.
The only procedure left is for the amendment to the Sikkim Panchayat Act to be cleared by the Legislative Assembly finalizing the reserved seats share of the different ST communities in the State. There has been a demand that the Scheduled Tribe seats be categorized by the community [Limboo, Tamang, Bhutia and Lepcha]. The earlier proposal of the RMD department had clubbed all the STs together. This now requires to be modified and necessitates an amendment to the Panchayat Act itself.
The RMDD Minister also informed that percentage of seats reserved for the different ST communities will be according to the ratio of their population. Officially, STs make up just over 40% of the state’s population.
Although the poll dates have not yet been announced, the State Government has cleared the reservation pattern for the upcoming two-tier Panchayat election. This was passed by the Cabinet in a sitting held on 28 August.
The reservation pattern is to segregate the different segments of the Tribal community, namely the Bhutia, Lepcha, Limboo and Tamang, informed Secretary, Rural Management & Development Department, DR Nepal while speaking to NOW! today. Earlier under the Sikkim Panchayat Act all of them were clubbed together as Tribals, but with this segregation they will be clubbed in different tribal communities, he added.
The reservation has been done as per the population of each tribal community taking the census and population of each tribal community into account, he further stated.
Also, starting with the upcoming panchayat polls, 50% of the panchayat seats will be reserved for women of all communities. The nodal department, RM&DD, in consultation with the State Election Commission, had finalized the reservation distribution pattern, the Secretary informed and added that this was the first time this was being done.
The delimitation of seats was also carried out by the RM&DD as per the guidelines and under the supervision of the State Election Commission after the urban areas were carved out from the rural bodies and notified for local bodies.
The department has also decided to place the reservation system approved by the Cabinet in the forthcoming summer session of the Sikkim Legislative Assembly expected to be held in the second week of September, he added.
The RM&DD has proposed an amendment to the Sikkim Panchayat Act, 1993 to reflect the nature and extent of reservation of different segments of the Scheduled Tribe community - namely, Bhutia, Lepcha, Limboo and Tamang under the ambit of reservation for Scheduled Tribe community.