Elections to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi will be held on December 4, the State Election Commission said on Friday, reported ANI. The results will be declared on December 7.

State Election Commissioner Vijay Dev said that the Model Code of Conduct will come into force in the national capital from Friday. He also said that 42 seats will be reserved for Scheduled Castes candidates, out of which 21 will be set aside for women of the communities.

Dev said that the Municipal Corporation of Delhi has jurisdiction over 68 out of 70 Assembly constituencies in the national capital.

After the dates were announced, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia expressed confidence that the Aam Aadmi Party will emerge victorious. “From December 7, the campaign to free Delhi from the mountains of garbage will begin under the guidance of [Kejriwal]” he said.

The BJP, on the other hand, asserted that voters would punish Kejriwal for “turning Delhi into a gas chamber”.

The Aam Aadmi Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party are the top contenders for the upcoming civic body polls. The BJP has been in power in Delhi’s now-unified three civic bodies for 15 years.

On October 27, Delhi Chief Minister and AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal had announced that his party would fight the polls on the plank of cleanliness.

On November 1, the Delhi unit of BJP launched a campaign to reach out to more than ten lakh households in the city ahead of the civic polls. In recent days, the BJP has also blamed the AAP government in Delhi for the deteriorating air quality in the National Capital.

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi polls, originally scheduled for April, were deferred hours before the election schedule was to be announced. The polls were called off as the Centre initiated the process to unify the three municipal corporations in Delhi and also to conduct delimitation to decrease the number of wards.

A delimitation exercise refers to demarcating boundaries of Assembly and parliamentary constituencies as well as civic wards.

The ministry of home affairs had constituted a three-member panel for carrying out delimitation of the municipal wards in Delhi from 272 to 250.

The North Delhi Municipal Corporation, South Delhi Municipal Corporation and East Delhi Municipal Corporation were merged in May. 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.

However, the ruling Aam Aadmi Party had objected to Delhi Delimitation Commission’s draft report had alleged that the exercise was politically motivated.

The Congress has, meanwhile, approached the High Court stating that it is not against the holding of municipal elections, but wishes for the conduct of the elections in a rational manner. It argued that the notified delimitation does not reflect equal and proportional representation, as there is inequality in terms of the population of wards.