Census will pave the way for redrawing of Lok Sabha constituencies

The first signs that India is likely to begin its long-delayed decadal census next year shifted the focus on Monday to the fractious process of redrawing of Lok Sabha constituencies. The delimitation exercise, likely to be completed by 2028 according to people aware of developments, will be done on the basis of the census and might open up old disputes of political representation between India’s poorer northern states that are more populous, and prosperous southern provinces where birth rates are below replacement levels.
To conduct the delimitation exercise, the Government of India must set up a delimitation commission by passing a delimitation act in Parliament after the conclusion of the census, former chief election commissioner SY Quraishi said. This delimitation commission will also be able to decide whether the number of Lok Sabha constituencies in the country should be increased.
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“The delimitation commission is headed by a Supreme Court judge and consists of two members — the chief election commissioner or one of the two election commissioners, and the state election commissioner of the state or UT where the delimitation exercise has to be carried out. Since this is meant to be a nationwide exercise, the state election commissioner from each state and Union territory will be a part of the committee,” Quraishi said.
This means that when this committee moves from, say, Punjab to Haryana, the state election commissioner of Punjab will be replaced by the one from Haryana.
In India, the delimitation exercise has been conducted four times — 1952, 1963, 1973, and 2002. In 1976, Quraishi explained that the delimitation exercise was suspended until the 2001 census so that the proportional political representation of states that had done well in family planning programmes was not affected in the Lok Sabha.
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In 2002, under the Vajpayee government, the delimitation exercise was taken up again but it was decided that only the borders of the parliamentary constituencies within a state or a Union territory could be redrawn based on the population, he said. Neither the state borders, nor the absolute number of constituencies within the state or UT could be altered for the next 25 years. The aim was to ensure that the seats allotted to each state would not be altered, thereby ensuring no benefit to states that had high birth rates.
This 2002 delimitation commission, headed by retired Supreme Court justice Kuldip Singh, lasted until May 2008 and its orders came into effect for most states and UTs in February 2008. The erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir was excluded from this exercise.
However, the delimitation for four north-eastern states — Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Manipur — was deferred through presidential orders issued in February 2008 due to security risks.
The Kuldip Singh delimitation commission discussed the problem of Lok Sabha constituencies with varying numbers of voters. For instance, Qurashi explained, during the 2004 general elections (when the commission’s orders had not come into effect), the Outer Delhi constituency had about 3.3 million eligible voters while Chandni Chowk had about 330,000 eligible voters.
“Personally, I believe that distribution of seats across states that have been frozen for the last 50 years cannot be touched because it would lead to massive protests as in the past. The southern states are already wary of losing their representation in the Lok Sabha for effectively controlling their populations,” Quraishi said. “Two prime ministers deferred the exercise. The logic remains the same. So it will be interesting how this is tinkered with,” he said.
Writing in HT in 2019, political scientists Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hinston calculated that in 2026, Uttar Pradesh’s Lok Sabha delegation could balloon from 80 to 143, while Kerala’s would remain unchanged at 20, and Tamil Nadu’s would grow from 39 to 49. The Lok Sabha”s overall strength in this scenario will increase to 848. Already, a number of southern leaders such as Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu and Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin have articulated anxieties around the falling birth rates in their respective provinces.
The basis for both comments is data that shows that the southern states have already seen their fertility rates dip below the replacement level (which ensures the population stays the same), indicating a declining (and ageing) population. The fertility rate for Tamil Nadu is 1.76, Andhra Pradesh 1.68. It is, at 2.35, higher than the replacement level of 2.1 in states such as Uttar Pradesh.
Delimitation, Quraishi said, could have an impact on how Lok Sabha seats reserved for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes are distributed and selected.