Yet this first mapping of the political geography of India in the 21st century did not take up some of the key challenges of the country’s demographic and political transition: shifting balance of population among different states, rapid urbanisation, salience of community-based politics and the proliferation of the third tier of democracy.

To be fair, the commission alone is not to be blamed for all this missed opportunity. Parliament itself tied the commission’s hands with a law freezing the number of Lok Sabha seats for each state as it stood after the last delimitation in 1974. It means that the value of a citizen’s vote in states like Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra, whose share in country’s population has grown, is much less than that of citizens in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, whose share has fallen. True, it is important to keep a balance of representation of different states in Parliament. But Rajya Sabha is the right place to attempt this federal balancing. Freezing Lok Sabha seats violates the basic constitutional and democratic principle of one person, one vote, one value.

While there was at least some logic to freezing the number of Lok Sabha seats, Parliament’s decision to freeze the number of assembly seats was simply beyond any reason. So we must persist with an anomalous situation of Uttar Pradesh which has five assembly segments in each Lok Sabha constituency compared to six in Bihar and Maharashtra and seven in AP and West Bengal. An increase in the size of the assembly would have reduced the number of voters that each MLA is expected to represent and thus led to greater political accountability.

... contd.