Uttar Pradesh panchayat election 2021: List of reserved seats to be released today

District Magistrates across Uttar Pradesh on Tuesday will release the list of reserved seats for all posts in the forthcoming gram panchayat elections in the state. The list will allow candidates to know the seats they are eligible to contest the polls from. However, the final list will only be published by 15 March once objections, if any, are cleared, said reports. Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath had floated a rotational formula for reservation following which the seats reserved for scheduled caste (SCs), scheduled tribe (STs) and other backward classes (OBCs) earlier will not be reserved for the same categories this year. According to the new formula, the seats for categories will be reserved based on their population, reported Hindustan Times. The three-tier panchayat elections are slated to take place in April, and a total of 57,207 heads will be elected. In February, the Allahabad High court had instructed the UP Election Commission to conduct the civic body polls by 30 April. The court had rejected the state’s undertaking that it would hold polls by May 2021, adding as that as per the mandate of the Constitution, the elections should have been held before 31 January this year. The five-year tenure of gram and village panchayat heads had ended in December last year following which the state had asked the district administration to take over, according to news agency PTI. Uttar Pradesh currently has 826 Vikas Khands (development blocks) and 58,194 gram sabhas with 7,31,813 wards in them. The kshetra panchayats have 75,855 wards while the state’s 75 zila panchayants have 30,051 wards. According to the Hindustan Times report, Manoj Kumar Singh, Additional Chief Secretary, Panchayati Raj, said that 330 seats will be reserved for STs, 12,045 for SCs and 15,712 for OBCs out of the total gram panchayats, adding that the reservation was based on the percentage of their population. “The reservation status of seats in 2015 will not be repeated,” Singh further said. With inputs from PTI