Counting of votes for high-stakes civic polls in Maharashtra begins; all eyes on Mumbai

Counting of votes polled in elections to 29 municipal corporations across Maharashtra began on Friday morning, with the spotlight on Mumbai, where the BJP-led Mahayuti bloc is locked in a prestige battle with the reunited Thackeray cousins for control of India's richest civic body.

Polling for 2,869 seats spread across 893 wards in these municipal corporations, including 227 in Mumbai, took place on Thursday. As many as 15,931 candidates are in the fray in the 29 civic corporations, which had 3.48 crore eligible voters.

Around 50 per cent polling was recorded in the 29 municipal corporations, State Election Commissioner Dinesh Waghmare said after the end of voting.

A voter turnout of 52.94 per cent was recorded in the Mumbai civic polls, down from 55.53 per cent in the last elections in 2017, officials said on Friday.

In the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), whose annual budget is over Rs 74,400 crore, 1,700 candidates are vying for 227 seats in elections being held after a four-year delay. Except for Mumbai, the other urban bodies have multi-member wards.

These were the first BMC polls since the 2022 split in the Shiv Sena, when Eknath Shinde, now Deputy Chief Minister, broke away with a majority of the party's MLAs and allied with the BJP to become the chief minister.

The undivided Shiv Sena held sway over India's richest civic body for 25 years (1997–2022). The BJP-led Mahayuti alliance, which also includes the Shinde faction of Shiv Sena, is hoping for a clear majority to rule the civic body.

In a significant political turn of events ahead of the elections, estranged cousins Uddhav and Raj Thackeray, heading Shiv Sena (UBT) and MNS respectively, reunited last month after two decades in their bid to consolidate Marathi votes, even as rival NCP factions forged a local alliance in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad.

The Congress, once a formidable political force in Maharashtra, asserted its presence in Mumbai by stepping out of the shadow of its Maha Vikas Aghadi allies—Shiv Sena (UBT) and NCP (SP). The grand old party joined hands with Prakash Ambedkar's Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) and the Rashtriya Samaj Paksh in the state capital.

Elections to the 29 municipal corporations were held after a gap of several years, with terms of most of them having ended between 2020 and 2023. Of these, nine fall in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), the most urbanised belt in India.

Voting took place in these municipal corporations: 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.