How Delhi's three municipal corporations became one Municipal Corporation of Delhi

Background

Municipal government for most of Delhi rests on the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act, 1957, an Act passed by Parliament. “The Act was amended in 2011 by Delhi Legislative Assembly to trifurcate the erstwhile Municipal Corporation of Delhi into: (i) North Delhi Municipal Corporation, (ii) South Delhi Municipal Corporation, and (iii) East Delhi Municipal Corporation.” The Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Bill, 2022 — a Home Affairs Bill — was introduced in Lok Sabha on March 25, 2022, passed by Lok Sabha on Mar 30, 2022 and by Rajya Sabha on Apr 05, 2022. It “replaces the three municipal corporations under the Act with one Corporation named the Municipal Corporation of Delhi”. Under the Act the number of seats in the three corporations taken together was not to exceed 272, and the Fourteenth Schedule listed 272 wards; the amendment provides that the total number of seats in the new Corporation should not be more than 250. Matters that the 2011 amendment had left to the Delhi government — the number of councillor seats and seats reserved for Scheduled Castes, the division of corporation areas into zones and wards, delimitation of wards, and the Commissioner's salary and leave — are instead given to the central government. The amendment also omits the post of Director of Local Bodies, allows the central government to appoint a Special Officer to exercise the Corporation's powers until its first meeting, and makes an e-governance system for citizen services “on anytime-anywhere basis” an obligatory function of the new Corporation. The unified Municipal Corporation of Delhi formally came into existence on May 22, 2022.