The stay imposed on December 12 , by the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court on the notification of the state’s municipal elections will continue till tomorrow.
The division bench headed by Justice DK Upadhyay gave this order on a PIL filed alleging that the state government has not followed the procedure in implementing OBC reservation in municipal elections.
The petition was heard for the second consecutive day on Tuesday in the High Court. Today the state government prayed for one day’s time to file its reply which was accepted by the High Court.The government has been ordered to file a reply by Wednesday. Along with this, the court has ordered the State Election Commission to stay the release of the election date till the completion of the hearing in the court on Wednesday.
On Monday, the High Court stayed the announcement of the election date till Tuesday.
Earlier, the state government had issued a provisional notification for reservation of seats for mayor and chairman in 760 municipal bodies in 762. These include 17 Municipal Corporations, 199 Nagar Palika Parishads and 544 Nagar Panchayats chairman seats. However, reservations have been fixed for all 762 municipal bodies. Eight seats of mayor including Lucknow, Kanpur and Ghaziabad have been kept unreserved. In 2017, all these three seats were reserved for women.