Punjab to hold LG elections on May 15

Special plan prepared to complete arrangements for polls

LAHORE:

The Punjab government has announced to hold local government (LG) elections in the province on May 15.

In a statement on Wednesday, Punjab Local Government Minister Mian Mahmoodur Rasheed announced the decision and said a special plan has been formulated to finalise the arrangements for LG polls, which would be conducted in two phases.

He noted that the direct election as per the provision in the LG law would end corruption and strengthen the local governments.

The minister pointed to a typical pattern in which local government wards were reconstituted and abolished after each election and said it was regrettable that the repeated “tinkering” with the wards had weakened the LG system.

“We are making efforts to ensure that no changes are made in constituencies for at least 25 years,” he said.

“In the past, no government has allowed local bodies to function properly but we are trying to give an independent local government system.”

The minister further said that the job of the members of the assembly is to legislate but they were doing the work of the local body representatives.

Read AGP, CEC ponder legal issues concerning elections

In December last year, the ruling party had faced startling setbacks in the first phase of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s local government elections with the candidates of the opposition parties managing to defeat its nominees.

Smarting from the electoral rebuke in the ruling party’s stronghold, Prime Minister Imran Khan later directed the Punjab government to immediately complete its homework for holding the local government elections in the province, saying that he himself would supervise its strategy.

PM Imran said, “The candidates should be selected by taking the workers and local leaders into confidence and all the reservations of PTI workers and the people should be removed.”

A day after his party lost several seats in the province and created a situation where it needed to do some soul searching, the premier in a tweet had admitted that the PTI had made ‘mistakes’ in the LG polls s and pinned the blame on "wrong candidate selection”.

Earlier this month, the ruling party and the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) vowed to jointly contest the upcoming local government (LG) elections in Punjab.

Meanwhile, local government elections will be held on April 15 in the federal capital through electronic voting machines (EVMs).

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has asked the federal government to provide 3900 electronic voting machines for the upcoming elections.