Skip to main content

Way paved for forming constituency delineation commission


 

Paving the way for the formation of a commission to recommend new electoral constituencies under the new constitution, parliament on Monday endorsed the Constituency Delineation Bill through fast track. In less than 10 months, the government must finalize new electoral constituencies in line with Article 286 of the constitution for holding provincial and parliamentary elections. Article 84 of the new constitution has proposed reducing the existing 240 electoral constituencies to 165 for parliamentary elections. Likewise, as provisioned in Article 176, the number of electoral constituencies for a given provincial assembly will be double the number of lawmakers that province sends to the federal parliament. 

The commission will finalize altogether 495 electoral constituencies, including 165 for the House of Representatives and 330 for the provincial assemblies. Amending the original bill tabled by the government, parliament included a provision stating that a constituency for the federal parliament should include twice as many constituencies for the provincial assembly. The amendment also made it mandatory to delineate at least two constituencies in a district for the provincial assembly. 

The first amendment to the new constitution effected in January 2016 had given the commission the mandate to delineate new electoral constituencies, taking population as the main basis and geography as a secondary basis. Section-5 of the bill states that population should be the main basis and geography the second basis while delineating electoral constituencies in the country.  Several lawmakers had registered an amendment proposal demanding revision of various provisions, and the House endorsed the bill through fast-track, incorporating some of the amendments. The bill, which has spelled out the jurisdiction of the commission among other things, will become law after the president endorses it.

According to the constitutional provisions, a retired justice of the Supreme Court shall be appointed chairperson of the commission and the four other members will include a geographer, a sociologist or demographer, an administration expert or jurist, and a gazetted special class officer as member-secretary.  The bill mentions that the decisions of the commission cannot be challenged in any court of law and will be implemented after the Election Commission publishes it in the Nepal Gazette. Making an amendment in the original bill, the House mentioned that the government must submit the report of the commission to the Election Commission within 15 days. 

The bill further proposes that the commission cannot split any existing district, village council or municipality ward while delineating new electoral constituencies for the federal parliament. However, the commission can split village councils and municipalities while delineating constituencies for provincial assemblies, reads the bill.  Also endorsing another bill, related to the number of wards, through fast track on Monday, parliament paved the way for the Election Commission to hold elections at the ward level as per the new local structures. 

MyRepublica

21/03/2017

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bhattarai stresses on rebuilding Nepal-India ties

- Kamal Dev Bhattarai Former Prime Minister and Coordinator of Naya Shakti Nepal Baburam Bhattarai has said that there is a lack of ‘proper understanding’ in India about Nepal. Speaking to Post before concluding his visit to India on Tuesday, leader Bhattarai said mainly young generation of India has some flawed understanding about Nepal and bilateral relations between the two countries. The former prime minister maintained that there is a need of dialogue, debate and discussions to rebuild the bilateral relations in the change political context Nepal and India. Bhattarai made such remark after extensive discussions with Indian intellectual and policy makers during his seven-day stay in New Delhi.  Bhattarai underlined the need for building a bilateral relation between two countries at the top political levels. Bhattarai was of the view that there has been a huge change in the political scenario of both countries and bilateral relation should be rebuilt accordingly. He ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Reduce Poverty: Much Neglected

Dilli Raj Khanal A progressive distributional policy together with the suitable institutional setups and arrangements at the grassroots for ensuring exclusively the access of poor to social and physical infrastructure as well as financial services is also a necessity . As a part of global event, poverty eradication day was celebrated in Nepal recently with claims that Nepal is one of the best performers in this area. If estimated poverty trends are looked into, there are no grounds to refute such an assertion. According to official figures, in 20 year’s period poverty has reduced by more than 20 per cent, from 41.8 per cent in 1995/96 to 21.2 per cent in 2015/16. Compared to the average GDP growth rate of 3.7 per cent in that period, the poverty reduction rate was about 3.2 per cent per annum. The breakdown by different updated poverty estimated periods give an interesting pattern. For instance, the annual poverty reduction rate was sharpest at 3.7 per cent annually during ...
Post a Comment
Read more

House panel has decided 3 % threshold provision

State Affairs Committee of the Parliament has decided to impose a threshold of three percent and at least one seat under the First-Past-the-Post electoral system to secure seats under the proportional representation system. The committee meeting on Wednesday took the decision to impose the threshold. Earlier, a sub committee formed by the committee decided to impose 3 percent threshold in the upcoming parliamentary election to become national political party. According to the subcommittee member Rameshwor Phuyal, the 27th meeting of the panel decided to provision three percent threshold after the rigorous discussion.  "Any political party must secure at least three percent seat under the Proportional Representation (PR) category and at least one seat under First-Past-the-Post category to become the national political party," said Phuyal.  He hailed the decision of the 11-member panel as historic. The sub-committee was failing to endorse the Bill Related to ...
Post a Comment
Read more