Education Qualification for Local Body Elections

One of the first decisions of the newly elected Rajasthan government has been to scrap the minimum educational qualification criteria for candidates contesting local body elections. This reverses the amendments introduced by the previous government of the BJP in 2015 which required candidates contesting the zila parishad and panchayat samiti elections to have passed Class 10 and those contesting sarpanch elections to have passed Class 8. Further, it disallowed those without functional toilets in their home to contest. Following this, Haryana also introduced similar restrictions for contesting local body elections.