The municipal polls look good this time. Staring down at the streets from large flex posters, well-dressed, well-coiffed women, in several cases young, bring to the dull business of freeing the city of garbage and water-logging a touch of glamour that was not seen before.

Some of them look like TV personalities. Some of them are. Some have impressive CVs. Some are politics veterans. In any case, women candidates are many, several of them first-timers.

Of the 144 seats in the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC), 33 per cent are reserved for women. It means 47 seats. But women have been fielded much in excess of the quota. The Left Front is leading with 75, Trinamul is not far behind with 64, the BJP has 58 and the Congress 49.

It is possible, technically, that more than half the councillors in the CMC - 72 - will be women, reflecting the gender ratio of nature. In the outgoing municipality, 55 of the 144 councillors are women.

The Left Front did it, says CPM leader Rabin Deb. He gives the front the credit for having brought women into politics. "They could rely on the social and economic developments during the 34 years of Left Front rule, and have been coming forward steadily to take part in democratic processes," says Deb. "Quantity makes for quality," he adds.

One of the virtues of women, Deb feels, is stability. It is of obvious value in Bengal's landscape of shifting political loyalties. "Women do not change like men. Women, as they hold a baby to the breast, also hold on to their political belief," Deb adds.

There is still faith in the innate goodness of female nature.

Trinamul leader Saugata Roy has a more worldly explanation of the strong female presence in these polls. It is because of reservation of seats.

Seats reserved for women ensure the election of a certain number of women. Then the reserved seats rotate. Yet, the women who were elected, the sitting councillors - 33 per cent of seats have been reserved for women in the CMC for several years now - contest from the general category seats again. So their number grows.

"Women's voices are being heard," says Roy. Women's issues are being represented. It is a process that was bound to happen, he adds.

But female empowerment manifests itself in different ways. Begum Shahzada is the Congress candidate from Garden Reach, Ward 135, reserved for women. Her son Saquib Shahzada, her election agent, speaks for her.

"My mother speaks only Hindi and Urdu," he says and explains her candidature. His father Shamsultan Ansari was a Congress councillor in the area from 1985 to 1990, when he was murdered. His mother, 58 a primary school teacher, is in the fray because of family legacy. One of her rivals is the daughter-in-law of her husband's political opponent.

"So it's basically a fight between my father and his rival," says Saquib. "But my mother will fight for women's rights. She will work with the women of the area."

His mother speaks, echoing him: " Auraton ke liye hum larenge (We will fight for women)," she says. She also mentions clearing the area of garbage and illegal construction.

Other candidates speak of family as a training ground. "We manage our families perfectly. It will reflect directly in governance," says the optimistic Deepika Nandi, 40, the BJP candidate from Ward 71, Bhawanipore, reserved for women.

Deepika, who studied IT at Middlesex University and is an admirer of Narendra Modi, deliberated on whether to join politics, then took the plunge about six months ago as her daughter turned five. It has left no one unhappy.

Mitali Saha, the BJP candidate from Ward 68 in Ballygunge, is confident that women want little and have a deeper sense of responsibility. "All our domestic helps are women. Men look outward," she says.

At the other end of the spectrum are the women for whom gender is almost irrelevant, possibly another consequence of empowerment.

Monalisa Banerjee, 31, studied mass communications and then filmmaking in Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and worked in an ad agency in Mumbai. When her father, Congress leader Basudeb Banerjee, passed away in 2012, Monalisa, an only child, felt a pull from inside to join politics.

She left advertising and joined her father's party. Dressed in a kurti and jeans in her small party office off MG Road, the Congress candidate from Ward 49 - a general category seat - says roads, water, electricity, garbage, drainage, and senior citizens' pensions are the issues she will work on.

Monalisa says she will make a difference, because she knows every household. Not because she is a woman and these are household issues.

Rather, she would borrow from her professional experience and use advertising and promotion effectively. "This is something Modi has done," she says. "But I need administrative power to do what I want to do."

For former television journalist Sudarshana Mukherjee, 39, another impressive CV-holder who is the TMC candidate from Ward 68, Ballygunge, the focus will be her ward, to the exclusion of everything else, even larger political issues.

She wants to clean up the area and render visible what lies beyond the graceful old buildings and tall apartments in the area: the slums. "The Dui Nombor bosti, Kakulia bosti, the slum behind Jamir Lane, the slum behind Fern Road, behind Tasty Corner." There are 22,000 voters out there.

It helps to be a woman, she says: "The hand that rocks the cradle can do anything. If a woman wants to work, there can be no better care giver. It is not for nothing that a woman councillor is called a ' pouramata' (civic mother)," she says.

But managing a ward is an individual's job and she does not see women, or for that matter any category of people, contributing collectively to that.

Tanima Chatterjee, the sitting councillor of Ward 87 and sister of Trinamul leader Subrata Mukherjee, brushes aside all gender stereotypes. "' Pourapitas' and 'pouramatas' are not important; what is important is that we are all civic representatives. How one works is important."

Two things remain, however.

One, there were 55 women in the outgoing CMC House and the city has seen no vast change in the last five years that can be attributed to them.

Two, in the flex posters, almost always, the women are flanked by images of party heavyweights, who are mostly male, when it's not Mamata Banerjee.