Mumbai will vote on Thursday (January 15) to elect a new Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. Polling will be held across 227 civic wards, with counting scheduled for Friday (January 16). A total of 1,700 candidates are in the fray, including 878 women and 822 men. The electorate stands at 1,03,44,315 voters, comprising 55,15,707 men, 48,26,509 women and 1,099 others.
Beyond the numbers, the election carries outsized political significance as it decides control of India’s richest municipal body, which oversees a civic budget running into tens of thousands of crores.
Three reasons why the BMC election was delayed
The last BMC election was held in 2017. The five-year term of corporators ended in March 2022 but fresh elections could not be conducted on time. This forced the civic body to be run by an administrator. The first reason behind the delay of civic polls across Maharashtra was the COVID-19 pandemic.
The second reason why the delay stretched far longer was because of legal disputes over Other Backward Class (OBC) reservation in local body elections.
In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that OBC reservation in civic polls could only be granted after a “rigorous empirical inquiry” to establish backwardness and underrepresentation. While the court later allowed up to 27% OBC reservation, it also warned state authorities and the State Election Commission against re-notifying election schedules in several local bodies, including the BMC, until all legal requirements were met.
Conflicting notifications, legal challenges and repeated warnings from the top court resulted in a stalemate that kept Mumbai without an elected civic council for nearly three years.
Delimitation dispute in Mumbai
The third major reason for the delay was the delimitation of municipal wards. Under the then Maha Vikas Aghadi government led by Uddhav Thackeray, the state decided to increase the number of BMC seats from 227 to 236. This prompted a fresh redrawing of ward boundaries in early 2022.
After the split in the Shiv Sena and the formation of the Eknath Shinde-led government, the new administration withdrew the delimitation order. The Bombay High Court later upheld this reversal, adding another layer of complexity.
The deadlock finally ended on August 4, 2025, when the Supreme Court directed the SEC to hold all pending local body elections in Maharashtra by January 2026 and also criticising the prolonged delay.
What happened in the 2017 BMC polls
The 2017 BMC election remains one of the most closely fought civic contests in Mumbai’s history. The undivided Shiv Sena, which has controlled the BMC since 1985, won 84 seats, narrowly edging out the BJP, which secured 82 seats.
None of the parties crossed the majority mark in 2017 and the Sena retained the mayor’s post with BJP support. However, the alliance later collapsed at the state level and the Shiv Sena split in 2022 completely altered Mumbai’s political arithmetic.
This election, the BJP is aiming to finally dislodge the Sena from its long-held civic stronghold and install Mumbai’s first BJP mayor. On the other hand, the rival Sena factions are fighting to preserve their relevance in the city’s power structure.