Miscellaneous
Home Ministry yet to ready poll law drafts
Proposing November-end as the final deadline to hold all the remaining polls, the Election Commission on Tuesday wrote to the government to ready two elections-related Acts by mid-July and to delineate electoral constituencies by mid-August.Proposing November-end as the final deadline to hold all the remaining polls, the Election Commission on Tuesday wrote to the government to ready two elections-related Acts by mid-July and to delineate electoral constituencies by mid-August.
The commission has clearly said delays in passing the laws and constituency delineation would impact preparations for the elections. However, hardly ten days
to the EC deadline, the government has not even drafted the bills necessary for holding the elections for provincial assemblies and the federal House of Representatives.
The Ministry of Home Affairs, which is responsible for the legislation, said it would take at least another five days to compete the drafts, which are endorsed by the Cabinet before being presented to the Legislature-Parliament.
Nirmala Bhattarai Adhikari, joint-secretary at the ministry, told the Post that they are working to table the bills in the Cabinet within five days. “Hopefully, it gets endorsed by the Cabinet within a week,” she said.
Given the parliamentary process to endorse the bills, it is unlikely that the Acts will be in place by mid-July as sought by the poll authority. The bills are first presented to Parliament for theoretical discussion and then lawmakers are given 72 hours to register their amendments to them.
The bills are tabled in the House again for final discussion and voting. The commission has proposed holding the polls for provincial assemblies by mid-October and for the central Parliament by November-end. Since at least three months are necessary for election preparations, the Act for Provincial Assemblies has to be in place by the end of July.
Nor has the government taken initiatives for forming the Electoral Constituencies Delineation Commission as provisioned in Article 286 of the constitution. Though Parliament endorsed the Act on March 20, clearing the legal hurdle for formation of the commission, the government has wasted four months.
Article 84 of the Constitution of Nepal sets 165 constituencies for the federal parliamentary elections, instead of the 240 at present. The number of electoral constituencies for each provincial assembly will be double the number of lawmakers representing the respective province in the Federal Parliament. The first amendment to the constitution recognises population as the main and geography as the secondary basis for constituency delineation.