MUMBAI, Oct. 22 -- In a major step towards conducting the long-pending BMC elections, the Maharashtra government has announced fresh rules for the rotation of reservation across all 227 wards. The government has also directed the State Election Commission (SEC) to treat the upcoming civic polls as "the first election under the new reservation rotation framework". In simple terms, this means that wards with the highest population of Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), and women will now be prioritised for reservation in the BMC polls. The move also carries political weight, potentially reshaping the electoral map of Mumbai, as parties with strong support among specific communities may benefit from the move, especially in wards where they already hold a significant voter base. On October 9, the urban development department issued the Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation (Manner of Allotment and Rotation of Reservation of Seats of Councillors in Wards) Rules, 2025. "For reserving seats of councillors for persons belonging to the SC category, the wards shall be first arranged in descending order, beginning with a ward where the percentage of population of the SC category with regard to the total population of such ward is the highest. Thereafter, seats shall be allotted to SC category, beginning. with the ward having the highest percentage of SC population," states the notification. "This effectively means, the wards having the highest population will have to be considered for reservation for a specific category," explained a senior official from SEC. "This would not have happened, and different wards might have been reserved for the polls, had the state government not directed the upcoming polls to be treated as the first election under the new rules." The process determines which wards are reserved for SC, ST, and women candidates. With each election cycle, the reservation in the wards gets rotated. The rotation method, which was first introduced in 1994, was adopted to ensure that different communities had opportunities to be represented over time, as a ward reserved for one group in one election could be open or reserved for a different group in the next. Currently, the BMC has a total 227 wards. Of them, 15 are reserved for SC and two for ST categories as the city has around 6.5 per cent and two per cent population of SCs and ST community respectively. The new framework, however, does not apply to the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category, as no caste census has been conducted for them. The wards for OBC category are reserved based on a lottery system. OBCs get 27% reservation following a verdict of the Supreme Court. The last category of reservation is for women....