Polling for seven urban civic bodies in West Bengal, including the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) and the Howrah Municipal Corporation (HMC), is likely to be delayed by around a month because the ward-wise rearrangement of voters linked to the delimitation exercise remains incomplete, sources in the West Bengal State Election Commission (WBSEC) have said.

Source: IANS via hi INDiA

Under the initial schedule, polling for the seven bodies was expected in the last week of November, with results in the first week of December. Officials now say holding the elections before the third or fourth week of December may not be feasible. A WBSEC source said all attempts would be made to complete the process by the third week of December so counting and results are finished before the year-end, but if polling slips to the last week of December, results would be declared before the first week of January 2027.

The immediate bottleneck is in Kolkata itself: the ward-wise voter redistribution is still pending in around 100 wards under the KMC area. A delay for Kolkata and Howrah would also push back the five other municipalities scheduled to vote simultaneously — Haldia Municipality in East Midnapore district, Dhupguri Municipality in Jalpaiguri district, Bally Municipality in Howrah district, and the Kalimpong and Kurseong municipalities in the hill districts.

7civic bodies facing a likely delay
~100KMC wards where voter rearrangement is pending
1.2 lakh+voter appeals cited as pending in Calcutta in the parties' memorandum

The voter-list dispute running alongside

The delay was discussed at an all-party meeting convened by the WBSEC on Tuesday, where representatives of the All India Trinamool Congress, the CPI(M)-led Left Front and the Congress urged the Commission to conduct the civic polls on the voters' list that existed before the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise. The parties alleged that many eligible voters were deleted from the rolls during the revision and that their fate is still pending before Appellate Tribunals — an allegation the Commission has not accepted or rejected publicly.

Source: IANS via hi INDiA

In a separate memorandum to State Election Commissioner Krishna Gupta, signatories including Trinamool Congress MP Saugata Roy, CPI(M) central committee member Samik Lahiri and Bengal Congress president Subhankar Sarkar, along with civil society representatives, cited Election Commission data submitted to the Supreme Court: more than 1.2 lakh appeals in Calcutta and nearly 39,000 in Howrah are pending before the SIR appellate tribunals, and, according to the figures cited by the signatories, more than 99 per cent of appeals already decided ended with voters being put back on the rolls. The memorandum asks that municipal elections be held only after the revision process is completed; under the current schedule the draft list is due on November 12 and the final revised list on January 4, 2027.

Source: eNewsroom India

No revised official polling date has been announced. WBSEC sources have not ruled out a further delay if the ward rearrangement and the pending tribunal appeals are not settled in time, and the voter-deletion dispute adds a legal layer that could invite court challenges before the schedule is finalised.