Counting of votes polled in elections to 29 municipal corporations across Maharashtra began on Friday morning, with voter turnout figures revised upward overnight, drawing attention to Mumbai where a high-stakes contest is underway for control of India’s richest civic body.
The BJP and ally Shiv Sena were ahead in high-stakes Mumbai municipal corporation elections as per early trends, after counting of votes began this morning.
While there was no official confirmation from the State Election Commission, TV channels said BJP was leading in 16 of the 227 wards in Mumbai, while Shiv Sena, led by Deputy CM Eknath Shinde, was ahead in 10 wards.
Polling for 2,869 seats across 893 wards in the 29 municipal corporations, including 227 seats in Mumbai, was held on Thursday. The elections saw 15,931 candidates in the fray, with 3.48 crore voters eligible to cast their ballots.
Initial turnout estimates released on Thursday evening had placed polling at around 50 per cent. “Around 50 per cent polling was recorded in the 29 municipal corporations,” State Election Commissioner Dinesh Waghmare said after the end of voting.
Speaking shortly after voting concluded at 5.30 pm, Waghmare said the turnout in the 29 civic bodies was in the “46 per cent-50 per cent range”. “The exact polling figures will be declared later,” another official had said.
However, final figures released more than 15 hours after polling showed a clear rise in turnout. The turnout was pegged at 52.94 per cent, nearly three percentage points higher than the Thursday evening estimates.
According to a PTI report, a voter turnout of 52.94 per cent was recorded in the Mumbai civic polls, officials said on Friday.
Of the over 1.03 crore eligible voters in the metropolis, 52.94 per cent exercised their franchise on Thursday between 7.30 am and 5.30 pm, they said, as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) declared the final turnout.
Data released by the civic body showed ward number 114 in suburban Bhandup recording the highest turnout at 64.53 per cent, while ward number 227 in south Mumbai’s Colaba area reported the lowest turnout at 20.88 per cent.
Officials noted that the 52.94 per cent turnout in Mumbai was lower than the 55.53 per cent recorded in the last BMC elections in 2017.
The Mumbai contest has drawn intense political interest, with the BJP-led Mahayuti alliance locked in a prestige battle against the reunited Thackeray cousins for control of the BMC, which has an annual budget of over Rs 74,400 crore. A total of 1,700 candidates are contesting the 227 seats in elections being held after a four-year delay.
These are the first BMC elections since the 2022 split in the Shiv Sena, when Eknath Shinde broke away with a majority of MLAs and allied with the BJP. The undivided Shiv Sena had controlled the civic body for 25 years between 1997 and 2022.
Ahead of the polls, Uddhav and Raj Thackeray reunited after two decades in an effort to consolidate Marathi votes, while rival NCP factions forged local alliances in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad. The Congress, seeking to reassert its presence in Mumbai, contested in alliance with Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi and the Rashtriya Samaj Paksh.
Elections to the 29 municipal corporations were held after a gap of several years, with the terms of most bodies having ended between 2020 and 2023. Nine of these corporations are located in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, India’s most urbanised belt.
Polling was held in Mumbai, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Navi Mumbai, Vasai-Virar, Kalyan-Dombivli, Kolhapur, Nagpur, Solapur, Amravati, Akola, Nashik, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Pune, Ulhasnagar, Thane, Chandrapur, Parbhani, Mira-Bhayandar, Nanded-Waghala, Panvel, Bhiwandi-Nizampur, Latur, Malegaon, Sangli-Miraj-Kupwad, Jalgaon, Ahilyanagar, Dhule, Jalna and Ichalkaranji.
