New Delhi, March 12 (IANS) The Lok Sabha to be constituted May 28 after the election process will have 11 more constituencies reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, the Election Commission said Thursday.
Though as per the mandate of the Delimitation Act, 2002, the total number of Lok Sabha seats have remained unchanged at 543 after the delimitation exercise last year, the number of seats reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have been raised by 11, the Commission said in a release.
The exercise, involving recasting and redrawing the boundaries of 499 parliamentary constituencies, has yielded five more seats for Scheduled Castes and six more seats for Scheduled Tribes, it added.
The 14th Lok Sabha had 79 seats reserved for Scheduled Castes and 41 for Scheduled Tribes. The 15th Lok Sabha, however, will have 84 Scheduled Caste and 47 Scheduled Tribe members, the Commission statement added.
During the exercise, the delimitation of the 44 seats in the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Manipur and Nagaland could not be completed due to various reasons, including lawsuits in the northeastern states.
The total number of eligible voters for the April-May general elections increased to 714,287,814, which is 43 million more than the number in the 2004 general elections.
The Commission is setting up 830,000 polling stations, equipped with 1.05 million electronic voting machines (EVMs).
In the 2004 general elections, 687,000 polling stations were set up for 671,487,930 eligible voters.
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