Kolkata, Nov. 6 -- West Bengal's opposition parties on Friday welcomed a Calcutta high court vacation bench's interim stay on the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) elections, saying they would await a single bench ruling on petitions challenging the delimitation exercise that increased the number of municipal wards from 144 to 209.

The court's order restrains the state election commission from notifying the polls until the petition is decided.

Former Kolkata mayor and CPI(M) leader Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, who represented the petitioners in the case, said the increase in the number of wards was unjustified as the city's geographical area had not expanded. "Old Calcutta (the original name until the renaming in 2001) had only seven o...