: Last week, Parliament passed two bills related to delimitation, that is, redrawing the Lok Sabha and state assembly constituencies. The Election Commission will complete the related work in a few months; and all elections, starting with the Karnataka assembly elections, will be contested for the newly drawn constituencies. Due to security reasons, the delimitation process is not applicable to Jharkhand, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur and Nagaland.
The Delimitation Commission is headed by a retired Supreme Court judge (Justice Kuldeep Singh) and has an election commissioner of India and the state election commissioner as ex-officio members, besides 10 associate members (without voting rights) in each state, five Lok Sabha MPs and five MLAs. Assembly constituencies in each state are drawn keeping in view a few parameters: the seat would be fully within one district; the lowest administrative units will not be broken up; contiguity and geographical features would be considered; and each constituency will have equal population (within a 10 per cent deviation). The Lok Sabha constituencies are made up of an integral number of assembly constituencies.
The number of seats in each state remains unchanged. An important implication is that the Hindi heartland would be under-represented in Parliament to the benefit of the southern states. That is, the 11 Hindi speaking states and Union territories would have 18 seats less than their population share, while the 6 southern states/UTs will have 12 more than theirs. The next delimitation will not be carried out before 2026. Given the continued divergence in population growth, the under-representation of Hindi states would increase to 37 seats and over-representation of the south to 26 seats by 2026. In the next election, Uttar Pradesh alone would have a deficit of 8 seats, which would widen to 16 seats by 2026.
The last such exercise was carried out after the 1971 Census. The Constitution originally stipulated that delimitation be carried out after every census so that each MP represented the same number of people. In the ’70s, this stipulation was seen to penalise areas that had successfully implemented family planning policies, and the Constitution was amended to postpone the process till 2000. The Constitution was again amended in 2002 and 2003 specifying that the 2001 Census be used. After these amendments, delimitation keeps unchanged the number of seats from each state. It uses data from the 2001 Census to redraw constituencies to provide equal representation within each state. It...
