| Subject: | Political Science \ Public Administration |
| Title: | Reservation Architecture and Social Category Representation in Metropolitan Municipal Corporations: A Comparative Study of Delhi and Mumbai |
| Author(s): | Ritu Rani |
| Published on: | 30th April 2026 |
| Published by: | Lyceum India |
| Name of the Journal: | Lyceum India Journal of Social Sciences |
| ISSN/E-ISSN: | 3048-6513 |
| Volume & Issue: | Volume: 3, Issue: 5 |
| Pages: | 168-185 |
| Original DOI (if any): | 10.5281/zenodo.19690539 |
| Repository DOI: | |
| Abstract: | Reservation policies in urban local governance constitute a critical institutional mechanism for ensuring inclusive political participation in India. This study examines the reservation architecture and category-wise seat distribution in two major metropolitan municipal corporations, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), using official electoral data from the 2017 municipal election cycles. Grounded in the conceptual framework of institutional design and democratic representation, the paper analyses the distribution of seats across Scheduled Castes (SCs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and women in both corporations. The findings reveal that while gender reservation is uniformly institutionalised across both bodies, with women constituting more than 50 per cent of elected councillors in each city, the architecture of caste-based reservation differs markedly. The MCD reserves seats only for Scheduled Castes and women, whereas the BMC incorporates a substantially broader framework that includes OBCs and STs. These variations demonstrate the decisive influence of state-level legislative frameworks operating within the constitutional space created by the Constitution (Seventy-Fourth Amendment) Act, 1992. The paper contributes to a comparative study on urban governance by foregrounding reservation architecture as a distinct and under-analysed dimension of metropolitan democratic politics in India. |
| Keywords: | Reservation Policy, Urban Local Governance, Metropolitan Municipal Corporations, Social Categories, Political Representation, Seventy-Fourth Constitutional Amendment, OBC Reservation, Scheduled Castes, Women’s Representation, Institutional Design |
| | Download PDF |
