Municipal commissioner Amol Yedge spent the afternoon of 7 September hearing nine Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar corporators explain why they should keep their seats. It was the third such sitting after 17 and 24 August, and Pudhari reports the running tally at 37 complaints against 25 corporators. The next round is listed for 15 September.
Where the complaints came from
Sambhajinagar elected 115 corporators on 15 January. Within three weeks, defeated candidates had filed objections against the winners, and those objections fall into a small set of categories: a third child, unauthorised construction or encroachment on civic land, false particulars in the election affidavit, and obstructing the corporation’s own encroachment-removal squads. Lokmat Times counted 18 corporators under complaint in early February, before the State Election Commission routed further petitions filed with it back to the commissioner. The count has climbed since, as officials merged and reopened files.
Section 10 of the Maharashtra Municipal Corporation Act, 1949 is what makes this possible. The commissioner can strike off a corporator who breaches the qualification conditions. The house cannot, and neither can the voters who elected them. An unelected officer decides, and the corporator’s remedy afterwards runs through the courts.
By party, the complaints are lopsided. Pudhari’s breakdown puts 30 of the 37 against 18 MIM corporators, six against BJP members and one against a Shiv Sena corporator. That distribution has an obvious political reading, and it is also what you would expect when complaints originate with losing candidates in the wards an opposition party swept. Neither reading is proof of anything, which is the point of holding hearings.
What residents in those wards stand to lose
A disqualification empties a ward seat. Until a by-election fills it, residents there have no corporator to sign off on a ward-level works list, chase a water connection or push a drainage complaint through the zone office. In a corporation that has spent this year fighting over encroachment drives, illegal hoardings and stalled housing, months without a ward’s own voice costs residents real leverage.
There is a second cost. Twenty-five seats is a fifth of the house. Even the possibility that a chunk of the general body could vanish gives every corporator under notice an incentive to keep the commissioner content, at the moment when the general body is supposed to be scrutinising him. Sambhajinagar’s civic administration has run for long stretches under an administrator with no elected house at all. The house has been back for eight months.
The two-child clause is the odd one out
Encroachment and false-affidavit complaints go to whether a corporator broke the law or lied to get elected. The third-child bar is different. Maharashtra still disqualifies candidates for having more than two children, at a state fertility rate of about 1.4, well below replacement. Telangana’s assembly scrapped the norm for local body polls in January, and Rajasthan’s cabinet dropped it too. Maharashtra has not revisited it, so a rule written for a demographic problem the state no longer has can still cost a sitting corporator their seat.
What to watch
Yedge has not ruled on any of the three batches heard so far, and corporators have been asking for time to study the evidence against them, which will stretch the timetable. Watch for the first written order: it will show how strictly he reads Section 10, and someone will appeal it. Watch too for whether the 15 September sitting holds, given how often this file has stalled since January.
Sources: Pudhari, Navbharat Live, Lokmat Times
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.