The meeting of the Constituent Assembly which was expected to start the process of voting to settle the contentious issues related to constitution drafting process on Thursday has been deferred till Friday.

Issuing a notice, the CA secretariat said that the session was put off till 3.00 pm Friday as the secretariat could not finalise the form containing a set of questions.

Nepali Congress parliamentary party leader Ram Chandra Poudel said they were consulting technical experts to shorten the questions. The CA secretariat has prepared questions on 116 disputed issues related to the constitution.

The major political parties had agreed to carry out voting at the CA after they failed to arrive at a consensus over federalism despite holding number of meetings till late Wednesday night.

The meeting of major political parties and the United Democratic Madhesi Front (UDMF) had failed to narrow down their differences as UCPN (Maoist) refused to budge from their stance on ethnicity-based federalism while NC and CPN (UML) were against it, arguing that it will only invite communal tension among different ethnic groups. nepalnews.com