The Trinamul Congress has decided to send party symbols to candidates for the July 8 panchayat polls directly from Calcutta in a bid to curb the control of local leaders over ticket distribution.

“Our national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee decided to distribute party symbols centrally from Calcutta. The form with the Trinamul symbol will be issued in the name of each of the 74,000-odd candidates from Calcutta. There will be no option for district-level leaders to allot the party ticket for the contest to someone, whose name is not on the candidate list,” said a senior Trinamul leader in Calcutta.

There will be 63,229 Trinamul candidates for 3,317 gram panchayats in Bengal. The number of candidates for 341 panchayat samitis and 20 zilla parishads will be 9,730 and 918, respectively.

A source in Trinamul said the decision to allot the symbol directly to a candidate by the central leadership had been taken considering the sour experience of the 2018 rural polls.

When the central leadership had sent forms with symbols to district-level functionaries for distribution in 2018, some of them had allotted the party tickets to their close aides, thus depriving the originally selected candidates of the nomination.

Trinamul insiders said they also wanted the candidates for the coming rural polls to file nominations on the last three days of the process. This is because there are indications that a large number of aspirants might turn rebels and file nominations as Independents if they are denied the party tickets.

The nomination filing started on Friday and will continue till June 15.

Trinamul leaders in Calcutta said the process of issuing party tickets was yet to start.

“A leader for each of the 20 districts going to the polls will be assigned as a signatory for issuing party nominations. It would take some time as each leader has to sign around 8,000 nominations. It can’t be possible before Monday as there will be some final corrections, too,” said a leader.