Gujarat Gram Panchayat elections on Dec 19

Gandhinagar, Nov 22 The Gujarat State Election Commission (SEC) on Monday declared elections for 10,879 Gram panchayats, including division elections in villages and by-elections of other gram panchayats. The elections will be held on December 19 and the results will be declared on December 21.

Informing the media on Monday, Sanjay Prasad, the SEC commissioner said, "The notifications for the elections will be issued on November 29 for all the elections and the last day of filing nominations is December 4. The scrutiny of the nominations will be carried out on the December 6 and the last day for withdrawal of application forms will be on December 7. Polling will be held on December 19 from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m."

The commissioner further said that the entire polling process will be declared complete on December 24. If required, re-polling will be held on December 20. The Commissioner also declared the polling dates for the division and by-elections for other gram panchayats.

"The polling for general elections will be for 10,117 villages consisting of 88,211 wards. Division elections will be for 65 villages and bypolls will be for 923 wards of 697 villages," added Prasad.

"The elections will be held through ballot as the required number of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) is not sufficient," added Prasad.

The Panchayat elections will be held in total 27,085 polling centres and a total of 54,387 ballot boxes will be required. There are a total of 2,06,53,374 voters registered out of which 1,06,46,524 are male and 1,00,06,850 are female.