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Telangana seeks fair deal in vote value
In the wake of Election Commission (EC) decision to decrease the value of each MLA’s vote ahead of the Presidential elections scheduled to be held on July 17, Telangana urged the EC to ensure a fair and scientific method of arriving at the vote value of an MLA.
Presidential Electoral College
Hyderabad: In the wake of Election Commission (EC) decision to decrease the value of each MLA’s vote ahead of the Presidential elections scheduled to be held on July 17, Telangana urged the EC to ensure a fair and scientific method of arriving at the vote value of an MLA.
It may be noted here that EC has notified the vote value in Telangana as 132, while increasing it for Andhra Pradesh to 159. The value of each MLA’s vote in the House of 294 in the undivided AP was 148.
At a time when the regional parties have potential to make the election of 14th President of India contest interesting, the TS wants to play rightful and dutiful role in the country’s federal polity.
Article 55 of the Constitution seeks to ensure uniformity in the scale of representation of different states in the election of the President. It specifies differing values of MLA votes for different states based on the population census of 1971.
While both Telugu-speaking States – AP and TS – were carved out from the erstwhile undivided AP in 2014, the value of vote for each MLA for these states has been approximated on the population census of 1971, awarding the AP MLAs a higher voting value (159) as compared to their counterparts in Telangana (139).
The contention of Karimnagar TRS Lok Sabha member B Vinod Kumar is that the census of 1971 does not do justice to the changed scenario today, especially after the split of united AP. Therefore the very metric on which the division of the 1971 population between AP and TS for the purpose of the upcoming Presidential election seems unscientific and specious.
Further he opines that since the formation of AP in 1956 and its bifurcation, there was a tremendous influx of population from AP to TS, especially in and around Hyderabad substantially ballooning the latest population numbers in the region.
Hence, the Centre and the EC should have amended the Article 55 (2) of the Constitution to ensure new states like TS do not get disadvantaged in the playing their part in the country’s federal polity.
In a letter to the Chief Election Commissioner of India Syed Nasim Ahmad Zaidi, the MP urged the authority to ensure the previous voting value of each MLA in TS such that at least till the time latest population figures of each of these two states could be factored in.
