Can We Make More Room In The House & Be Fair?

A fresh delimitation to reallocate Lok Sabha seats between states and redraw seat boundaries within each state has become rather fraught, highlighted by Tamil Nadu CM’s claims and counterclaims from the Union home minister. So what exactly is the delimitation exercise and will it really end up reducing seats for the southern states?Delimitation was to be undertaken after every Census to ensure distribution of seats among states reflected their respective shares in the country’s population that’s necessary to ensure the one-man-one-vote principle is upheld. The periodic exercise is also necessary because as populations grow, the number of constituents each MP or MLA represents also keeps growing if their number remains unchanged.With population control among key obsessions of the time, the 42nd amendment enacted during Emergency mandated that there would be no change in allocation of seats between states and Union territories till after the 2001 Census. The 91st amendment of 2001 extended this freeze till after the first Census conducted post-2026. The idea was that states that had done, or were doing, a good job of population control should not be ‘penalised’ by their share of seats getting reduced.The result of this freeze over half a century is that today the states’ shares of seats are completely out of whack with their share of the population. If we take the projected population for March 2025, for instance, Kerala has a Lok Sabha MP for every 18L people while Rajasthan has one for every 33L. In the 1970s, all states (barring the really small ones and UTs) had an MP for roughly 10L people.An MP representing 33L people clearly makes it very difficult for her (or him) to get to know the constituents, or for constituents to have access to their MP. This problem can be easily solved by merely increasing the total number of seats without changing the shares. That, however, would be violative of the proportionality principle.So, if the proportionality principle is to be upheld, what would that mean in terms of seat shares? Obviously states that have seen a faster rise of population over the last half a century would gain seats while those that have had more modest growth in population would see their shares declining. But just how much would the change be?Some fairly simple calculations using population projections by the Census office for March 2025 show that if no major state is to suffer a decline in LS seats but their shares are to reflect population shares, the size of Lok Sabha would have to expand to about 790.In such a scenario, Kerala would see its LS seats remaining at 20 while all other major states would see additions to their seat tally. However, in terms of their share of total LS seats, the southern states would suffer a significant loss. As of now, the five southern states between themselves have 129 of the 543 LS seats or about 24%. In an LS with 790 seats, they would have 152 seats or just over 19%.In contrast, the larger Hindi-belt states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh currently have 174 or 32% of LS seats. In the 790-member House, that number would jump to 300 or about 38% of the total. UP’s tally alone would rise from the current 80 to 133 seats – that’s 17% by proportion.And there lies the nub of the problem. In a federal polity characterised by linguistic and ethnic diversity of the kind that India has, it is hardly surprising that such drastic changes in the relative political clout enjoyed by a single state or group of states are viewed with much concern. To leaders from these states, it is little consolation to know that the change would be serving the principle of proportionality.Is there no way, then, of balancing this principle with the need to assuage the concerns of the states that are slated to lose out? The US structure has chosen to address this by letting the share of seats in House of Representatives be determined by population shares but keeping each state’s share in Senate fixed at two and by ensuring that Senate is in fact the more powerful of the two Houses.In India, it is difficult to see Rajya Sabha, or house of the states, being granted a more powerful role, while reducing the clout of Lok Sabha, house of the people. That means there clearly is no easy way out of this one.That said, it’s somewhat puzzling that delimitation should be gaining so much attention now given the fact that it is scheduled to take place on the basis of the first Census after 2026. Is this an indication that nobody’s expecting the long due 2021 exercise to be implemented even this year, or the next?