The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court has ordered to continue the stay till December 20 on issuing notification for the municipal elections in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
The division bench headed by Justice DK Upadhyay gave this order on a PIL filed accusing the state government of not following the procedure in implementing OBC reservation in municipal elections.
During the hearing held on Wednesday, the state government prayed for three days’ time to file its counter affidavit, which was accepted by the court.
On Tuesday, a day’s time was sought from the government to filed it’s reply. On this, the division bench of Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyay and Justice Saurabh Srivastava, fixed the next hearing of the matter for today.
On Monday, the High Court stayed the announcement of the election date till Tuesday.
According to the PIL, the Triple Test Formula suggested by the Supreme Court was not considered in deciding the OBC reservation. The PIL alleged that under the decision of the Supreme Court, no reservation can be given to OBCs until the state government completes the formalities of the triple test. Whereas without completing this formality, the government issued notification of provisional reservation.
At the same time, it was said on behalf of the government that the notification of December 5 is just a draft order. The government has sought objections on this. The aggrieved can file his objections. Thus, this petition has been filed prematurely.
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.