The ball has been set rolling for initiating the electoral process in Jammu and Kashmir, which is without an elected government since November 2018.
The Delimitation Commission on Thursday released its final report, redrawing the electoral map of J&K and earmarking more seats for Jammu in the 90-member Assembly.
The Valley, however, will still have an upper hand with 47 seats, as against Jammu’s 43.
In the dissolved State Assembly, Kashmir had 46 seats and Jammu 37, while the Ladakh Union Territory had 4. The erstwhile J&K state used to also have notional 24 seats for the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and a legislative council which was junked by the government at the time of scrapping of J&K’s special status.
There will be five parliamentary constituencies, each with an equal number of 18 Assembly seats, for the first time. Another first is creation of nine seats reserved for the Scheduled Tribes (ST), 6 of them in the Jammu region and 3 in the Valley.
The commission has also recommended additional seats in the assembly for Kashmiri migrants and displaced persons from Pakistan occupied Kashmir.
The Delimitation Commission, headed by Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai, a retired judge of the Supreme Court, and Chief Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra and state election commissioner K K Sharma as its ex-officio members, held a meeting here on Thursday to finalise the delimitation order, which has been since gazetted.
It treats Jammu and Kashmir as a single entity for the purpose of delimitation. No assembly constituency overlaps two districts, as all remain within the boundary of the concerned district.
An official statement said the delimitation commission took extreme care in identifying the seats reserved for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, by working out the percentage of their population in each constituency.
