India: Kanpur will no longer elect woman mayor following new formula

Kanpur: The city's mayor seat will no longer be reserved for the woman candidate. This has been made clear with the fresh formula on reservations in the urban local bodies elections.

Now, the reservation will be about 35% of the 17 posts for women candidates.

The unreserved mayoral seats include Kanpur, Gorakhpur, Varanasi, Bareilly, Shahjahanpur, Firozabad and Ghaziabad.

Six mayoral seats have been reserved for women. Three of these are for women of the general category and three for women of the reserved category.

Among the 11 remaining seats, two have been reserved for OBCs (Prayagraj and Meerut) and one for Scheduled Castes (Jhansi) and eight are general seats.

The UP urban development minister A K Sinha said that Ayodhya, Saharanpur and Moradabad would now have women mayors from general category. Agra will have a woman mayor from the scheduled castes and Mathura-Vrindavan and Aligarh would have OBC women as mayors.