Counting of votes began on Friday to decide the fate of 29 municipal corporations across Maharashtra that went to polls on January 15.
The spotlight, however, is on Mumbai, where the BJP-led Mahayuti bloc will battle the reunited Thackeray cousins for control of India’s richest civic body.
For 2,869 seats spread across 893 wards in these municipal corporations, including 227 in Mumbai, as many as 15,931 candidates are in the fray.
Of the 3.48 crore eligible voters, voter turnout of 52.94 per cent was recorded in the Mumbai civic polls, down from 55.53 per cent in the last elections in 2017, officials said on Friday.
Around 50 per cent polling was recorded in the 29 municipal corporations, State Election Commissioner Dinesh Waghmare said after the end of voting.
According to data released by the civic body, ward number 114 in suburban Bhandup recorded the highest turnout at 64.53 per cent, while ward number 227 in south Mumbai’s Colaba area reported the lowest turnout at 20.88 per cent.
Also Read: Maharashtra Civic Polls: 50 pc turnout, Exit Polls favor BJP
Elections to the 29 municipal corporations were held after a gap of several years, with terms of most of them having ended between 2020 and 2023. Of these, nine fall in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), the most urbanised belt in India.
These were the first BMC polls since the 2022 split in the Shiv Sena when Eknath Shinde, now Deputy Chief Minister, broke away with a majority of the party’s MLAs and allied with the BJP to become the chief minister.
Estranged cousins Uddhav and Raj Thackeray, heading Shiv Sena (UBT) and MNS, respectively, reunited last month after two decades in their bid to consolidate Marathi votes even as rival NCP factions forged a local alliance in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad.
The Congress, once a formidable political force in Maharashtra, asserted its presence in Mumbai by stepping out of the shadow of its Maha Vikas Aghadi allies – Shiv Sena (UBT) and NCP (SP). The grand old party joined hands with Prakash Ambedkar's Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) and the Rashtriya Samaj Paksh in the state capital.
Voting took place in these municipal corporations: Mumbai, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Navi Mumbai, Vasai-Virar, Kalyan-Dombivli, Kolhapur, Nagpur, Solapur, Amravati, Akola, Nashik, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Pune, Ulhasnagar, Thane, Chandrapur, Parbhani, Mira-Bhayandar, Nanded-Waghala, Panvel, Bhiwandi-Nizampur, Latur, Malegaon, Sangli-Miraj-Kupwad, Jalgaon, Ahilyanagar, Dhule, Jalna and Ichalkaranji.
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