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BMC Poll: Mumbai Civic Elections May Commence from the Second Week of January
- by Webdesk
- 05 Dec 2025
Source: Hindustan Times
Mumbai: With election-related preparations progressing rapidly across most of Maharashtra’s 29 municipal corporations, officials familiar with the process indicate that civic polls are likely to be conducted in the middle of January. At the same time, elections for district councils and panchayat samitis are expected to take place towards the end of January.
On Thursday, the State Election Commission (SEC) convened a review meeting with every municipal commissioner to assess the readiness of the civic bodies for elections. Another review session has been scheduled for Monday, after which the SEC is likely to officially declare the dates for the municipal elections.
A majority of municipal corporations have confirmed that they are on course to meet the SEC’s December 10 deadline for finalizing electoral rolls and identifying duplicate voter entries. However, officials said the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has requested a couple more days to complete the task.
According to civic officials, the delay is primarily because BMC requires additional time to determine whether voters with identical names are actually duplicates. The voter list supplied by the SEC does not include photographs, based on a directive from the Supreme Court, which has made confirmation more challenging in cases involving namesakes. There have already been instances where individuals with exactly the same name were incorrectly marked as duplicate voters.
To handle this complication, the BMC has developed a special mechanism to detect photo-similar records in the electoral data shared by the SEC. The corporation expects that the identification of repeated voter names and finalization of the updated electoral roll will be finished within the next week. Meanwhile, the process of flagging repeated voters to make sure no one casts multiple votes will continue for a few weeks even after the election schedule is announced, an official stated. The civic body is also collecting written undertakings from individuals whose names appear in more than one location to prevent them from voting at more than one polling booth.
Initial estimates suggest that across all 29 municipal corporations, there could be over 2 million repeated entries, with nearly 1.1 million originating from Mumbai alone.
Despite the ongoing effort to remove inaccuracies in the voter list, sources within the SEC still anticipate that the civic body elections will be held in mid-January. “The announcement is expected sometime after December 15, and the elections will most likely take place between January 15 and 18. We have instructed all corporations to keep discrepancies in the electoral rolls as limited as possible to prevent objections from voters and allegations from opposition parties,” an official familiar with the matter said.
Officials added that apart from the identification of duplicate voters, most of the other election preparations are already completed, including ward formation and allocation of electronic voting machines (EVMs). The next review scheduled for Monday will be crucial, as a final decision regarding the conduct of the polls is expected to be taken at that meeting.
Recently, the Supreme Court granted approval for the pending elections to move ahead, including constituencies where reservation has crossed the 50% limit. Due to this green signal, the SEC decided to advance the municipal corporation elections to the second phase, instead of holding them in the originally planned third phase. However, since the apex court has not permitted elections for district councils and panchayat samitis where the reservation exceeds the 50% cap, these elections are expected to be shifted to the third phase.
It may be recalled that polling for 222 municipal councils and 42 nagar panchayats took place on December 2, marking the completion of the first phase of the local body elections. The SEC must now ensure that the entire election process for every local self-governing body in Maharashtra is completed by January 31, 2026, which is the constitutional deadline.
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