Neither Parliament nor the commission seems to have learnt from the disastrous experience of the previous one in dealing with urbanisation which resulted in monstrous constituencies like East Delhi with an electorate over 30 lakh. If we wish to freeze electoral boundaries for the next 25 years, we cannot take the population figures that are already seven years old. We have to consider professional population projections. But this route was firmly avoided once again. We can be fairly sure that the experience of East Delhi will be replicated in Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad and dozens of other peripheries of urban centres all over India, leading to a severe under-enfranchisement of the urban poor halfway through the period of the current delimitation.

The DC appears to have avoided some tough questions. While it has reduced arbitrariness in deciding which assembly constituency is to be reserved for the Scheduled Castes, it did not do the same for Lok Sabha constituencies. Nor did it address the tough question of rotating seats which have been reserved for three or in some cases even five decades. Another tough question pertained to whether the existence of social communities would be taken into account while drawing boundaries. We do not need to follow the American method of carving black majority constituencies. But the DC could take a cue from the Sachar Committee and find ways to make the delimitation process more sensitive to the communities that suffer from severe under-representation in our legislatures.

The biggest opportunity missed by the commission is its refusal to align the map of the first and the second tier of democracy to the third tier. We have a ridiculous situation of two parallel electoral rolls for the entire country, one for Lok Sabha and assembly elections and another for panchayat and municipal elections. All that the DC needed to do was to define the boundary of each assembly segment in terms of a group of panchayats or municipality wards. Instead it has persisted with an archaic practice of defining the assembly constituency in terms of revenue circle in one state, mandala in another, police thana limits in the third and panchayat in yet another state. This is not just technical and could have long-term political significance if we wish to have any serious decentralisation of power in the country.

... contd.