Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar:
The municipal corporation is set to appoint 10 co-opted members. A total of 80 applications were received by the municipal secretary’s office for this purpose. Scrutiny of the applications was conducted on Monday, during which 52 applications were found valid, while 28 were rejected. The AIMIM party has announced the names of three candidates from its quota. However, the BJP, Shinde Sena, and Uddhav Sena have not yet declared their nominees. Political parties have adopted a cautious approach to avoid dissatisfaction among party workers.
In the municipal elections, 115 corporators were elected from 29 prabhags. During the elections, political leaders had assured many rebellious or disgruntled party workers of co-opted members to pacify them. However, now that the time has come to actually allocate these posts, local leaders across parties appear to be shifting responsibility to higher authorities.
Last week, the AIMIM was the first party to announce three names. Notably, AIMIM has decided to appoint co-opted members for only one year. Over a period of five years, a total of 15 individuals will be appointed to these positions. This is the first time such an experiment is being conducted in the history of the municipal corporation.
On Monday, 80 applications were scrutinised in the municipal commissioner’s office. Of these, 28 applications that did not meet the criteria were rejected. The list of the remaining 52 candidates was released by the municipal corporation late at night. Based on party strength, the BJP will be able to appoint a maximum of five members, followed by three from AIMIM, and one each from Shinde Sena and Uddhav Sena.
Harshvardhan Kenekar withdraws
Harshvardhan, son of MLC Sanjay Kenekar, was also interested in seeking nomination for the position and had submitted an application. However, on March 31, he submitted a letter to the municipal corporation administration stating that his application should not be considered during scrutiny, as he was withdrawing from the process.