Former President Ram Nath Kovind, who chairs the committee that will examine the proposal for concurrent national, state and local elections, on Saturday said the panel would hold its first meeting on September 23.

“The first meeting will take place on September 23,” Kovind said in Bhubaneswar.

Supreme Court lawyer and rights activist Prashant Bhushan had recently said the proposal for concurrent polls was a ruse to postpone the Assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Telangana and Rajasthan, which the BJP was afraid of losing.