NAGPUR: The Shiv Sena has named six city pramukhs in Nagpur at one go, a reorganisation aimed at building a separate unit for every assembly constituency.
The party led by deputy chief minister Eknath Shinde handed over the appointment letters at a meeting on Wednesday. Sanjay Nirupam, the party's contact minister for Nagpur, distributed them.
South-west Nagpur has gone to Sumukh Mishra. The remaining five names are on the list the party released.
Six city chiefs in one city is a change in how the party runs its urban organisation. Until now Nagpur had a single city pramukh. Under the new arrangement, each assembly segment gets its own charge-hand.
Nagpur is Vidarbha's largest city and the state's second centre of government, which makes its organisation a test case for the region. For the party, a stronger Nagpur unit is a stronger claim on Vidarbha as a whole.
At street level, the change means ward and prabhag-level work will now be reviewed constituency by constituency, with each office-bearer answerable for his or her own patch.
The party has not put an official reason on record. Locally, the reading is that this is preparation for municipal elections, with the unit structure settled before the contest rather than after it.
Two tasks are immediate for the new appointees: filling out the prabhag-level teams, and building a machinery that takes the party's programmes to households rather than to meeting halls.
Constituency-wise meetings are expected over the next few weeks. Until they happen, the reorganisation is a paper structure, and Nagpur's party workers will be watching who actually gets to run what.