The Union home ministry has set up a three-member panel to carry out a fresh delimitation of the municipal wards in Delhi, the national capital’s civic body said in a statement on Saturday, according to PTI.

A delimitation exercise refers to demarcating boundaries of Assembly and parliamentary constituencies as well as civic wards. The exercise will pave way for in Delhi’s municipal elections, which would be the first since the three corporations were merged.

North Delhi Municipal Corporation, South Delhi Municipal Corporation and East Delhi Municipal Corporation were merged in May. The body new is called the Municipal Corporation of Delhi .

After the merger, there were 272 seats in the civic body. However, the total number of seats cannot be more than 250 and so a delimitation exercise was necessitated.

On Saturday, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi said that the delimitation commission will have three members – State Election Commissioner Vijay Dev, Joint Secretary in Union Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs Pankaj Kumar Singh and Additional Commissioner of the civic body Randhir Sahay.

The State Election Commission had initially scheduled the corporation polls for March 9. They were rescheduled to April.

Later, the poll panel deferred the polling indefinitely, citing a communication from Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal after the Bill to merge the civic bodies was introduced in the Union Cabinet in April.

The Aam Aadmi Party had vehemently opposed the merger saying that the Bill was introduced by the Centre to postpone the civic elections in the Capital.

Aam Aadmi Party leaders had said that the unification of municipal corporations could have been done in the last few years, as the Bharatiya Janata Party has been in power in the Centre since 2014. They had alleged that the BJP was doing it now to postpone the elections because the saffron party knows that it will not win.