I came from Nagpur in July to do a year-long course in Journalism at St. Pauls Institute of Communication Education (commonly referred to by us as SPICE), in Bandra West. Currently, I live in Kurla, which is convenient as a location and also for transport.
As the Vidhan Sabha elections are likely to be held towards the end of the year, we were assigned a project, where we had to identify and name the MP, the MLA, and the Corporator of our locality. Since this was a project to map our area, we were told to begin at the lowest level of governance (civic) by finding out the electoral ward of our area, and then proceeding to the other two higher levels. However, I chose to do this in reverse.
It is important to know that Mumbai is divided into six Lok Sabha constituencies, 36 Vidhan Sabha constituencies, and 227 electoral wards. Besides this, another piece of useful mapping is finding out which administrative ward is yours. This is to get an idea of their different functions.
In Mumbai, while electoral wards are numbered, administrative wards are represented by alphabets – from A to T. I live in the L ward.
The easiest task was to find out my Lok Sabha constituency. Here I should point out that the first thing you do is work from your proper address. Since I live in Kurla, I just went on Google and checked. Mumbai North Central is where I am located according to Lok Sabha constituency. This includes Vile Parle, Chandivali, Kurla, Kalina, Bandra (or Vandre) West, and Bandra East. It was easier to find out from there, who my MP is – none other than INC’s Varsha Gaikwad, who defeated the BJP’s Ujwal Nikam in the recent Lok Sabha elections.
Based on my address, I now know that my Vidhan Sabha constituency is Kurla West. To check who my MLA is currently, I went back to Google and got my answer, – Mangesh Kudalkar from Shiv Sena [Shinde group].
Here I would like to add a tip – to check in which constituency you live, use your pincode and start from there.
Of course, you will then want to check out how effective your MLA has been in the past five years since he/she was elected. I would like to recommend that you go to the Praja Foundation website https://www.praja.org/ Here you will get the “who, what, where, how, and why” performance of your MLA in detail.
What I found tough was to locate my area’s corporator, mainly because there is no one right now. This is because elections should have been held in 2022 but were cancelled. Since then, Mumbai has been run by career bureaucrats.
To find my corporator, I had to search through many websites but there was no solid information. Finally, searching at random, I got a PDF which helped me to find the corporator of my area.
However, the BMC website https://portal.mcgm.gov.in/irj/portal/anonymous?guest_user=english is a very helpful website that tells one a lot about Mumbai, giving detailed information that is very useful. Also useful is https://www.maharashtra.gov.in/
For students of journalism, it is important to know how to map one’s city. In the first place, this gives you an idea of how the city is governed and the human element of the politics of the system. In the second place, mapping a constituency in order to write about it, makes one familiar with the issues it faces. Together, these can be a source of any number of stories. As a budding journalist, interested in politics and governance, this is where I will finally work.
There are 36 Vidhan Sabha Constituencies in Mumbai –
Sr.no according to Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha. | MLA | Constituency |
152 | Sunil Rane | Borivali |
153 | Manish Chaudhary | Dahisar |
154 | Prakash Surve | Magathane |
155 | Mihir Kotecha | Mulund |
156 | Sunil Raut | Vikhroli |
157 | Ramesh Korgaonkar | Bhandup [W] |
158 | Ravindra Waikar | Jogeshwari [E] |
159 | Sunil Prabhu | Dindoshi |
160 | Atul Bhatkhalkar | Kandivali [E] |
161 | Yogesh Sagar | Charkop |
162 | Aslam Shaikh | Malad [W] |
163 | Vidya Thakur | Goregaon |
164 | Bharti Lavekar | Versova |
165 | Ameet Satam | Andheri [W] |
166 | Rutuja Latke | Andheri [E] |
167 | Parag Alavani | Vile Parle |
168 | Dilip Lande | Chandivali |
169 | Ramchandra Kadam | Ghatkopar [W] |
170 | Parag Shah | Ghatkopar [E] |
171 | Abu Asim Azmi | Mankhurd Shivaji Nagar |
172 | Nawab Malik | Anushakti Nagar |
173 | Prakash Phaterpekar | Chembur |
174 | Mangesh Kudalkar | Kurla |
175 | Sanjay Potnis | Kalina |
176 | Zeeshan Siddique | Vandre [E] |
177 | Ashish Shelhar | Vandre [W] |
178 | Varsha Gaikwad | Dharavi |
179 | Captain R Tamil Selvan | Sion |
180 | Kalidas Kolambkar | Wadala |
181 | Sada Sarvankar | Mahim |
182 | Aditya Thackeray | Worli |
183 | Ajay Choudhari | Shivadi |
184 | Yamini Jadhav | Byculla |
185 | Mangal Prabhat Lodha | Malabar Hill |
186 | Amin Amir Ali Patel | Mumbadevi |
187 | Rahul Narvekar | Colaba |