more-in The draft list and boundary details of wards of all local bodies in Madurai district, which was released last week after the recently completed delimitation exercise, has already received overwhelming number of objections, predominantly from various political parties. Madurai East MLA P. Moorthy petitioned Collector K. Veera Raghava Rao on Tuesday along with tens of supporters, raising a number of concerns over the delimitation exercise. Later, speaking to the media, he said that there were problems in the redrawn boundaries of wards in all the 13 panchayat unions, three municipalities, nine town panchayats, and at least 24 wards of Madurai Corporation. “The exercise was not carried out meticulously. There were cases where a single street got split between two wards. A number of wards have also moved from one Assembly constituency to another,” he said. Alleging that the State Election Commission had given extremely short time to political parties and the public to report any objections to the delimitation exercise, he urged the Collector to convene another meeting with political parties to discuss all the issues. “The exercise must be done in a consultative manner with inputs from all political parties and the public,” he added. Meanwhile, in Palamedu, a group of people staged a road roko in the morning to highlight their opposition to the delimitation of wards in town panchayat. According to the protesters, a ward, which had predominant Dalit population, was split between two wards, which, according to them, resulted in loss of representation. Stating that this was the only ward in the town panchayat from which they could elect a Dalit representative, the protesters said that the delimitation exercise had taken away their representation. In Madurai Corporation, meetings with representatives of political parties happened in all its four zonal offices. Corporation officials said that a total of 155 written objections were received at the meetings.

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