Delimitation and Upcoming Political Battles

Delimitation is an opportunity for various reforms. Will they happen?

The underlying principle behind the constitutional design of the Lok Sabha

In 1950, when the Constitution of India came into force, the population was about 350 million. The first Lok Sabha had 489 members, with each Member of Parliament (MP) representing roughly 720,000 constituents. Representation was based on the 1951 census. Over time, the delimitation commission increased the Lok Sabha seats and redrew boundaries of constituencies based on successive censuses. It helped ensure that seats in Lok Sabha rose commensurate with the population. The last delimitation exercise held in 1973, increased seats to 543 with each MP representing roughly 1.1 million constituents.

The Indira Gandhi government — for various political reasons — kicked the can down the road with the 42nd amendment to the Constitution. It froze the seats in the Lok Sabha to 543 until after the 2001 census. With the 84th amendment — passed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee — delimitation was frozen until the first census after 2026¹.

With the population ballooning and number of seats stuck in 1973, one MP represents about 2.7 million constituents². This causes two crises. One is the sheer lack of representation. I cover this in my previous post on the problems facing Indian democracy. To recap, in other Western federal democracies, a member of the Lower House could serve anywhere from 90,000 constituents in France to about 900,000 in the US. Representing thrice the number of constituents as even the US is simply not possible. In practice, MPs simply serve one part of their constituency well enough to gather about 25% of the vote and then with some caste politics and jingoism thrown into the mix, they can be reasonably assured of getting that figure to 35%. In a First Past the Post (FPTP) system, getting around 35% of the vote is often enough to be elected.

The other problem is malapportionment in representation between different states of the Union. For example, Kerala has 20 seats in the Lok Sabha so one MP represents about 1.75 million people while in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh, the figure is closer to 3 million. The problem with this? The accident of your birth — whether you are born in Kerala or Bihar — determines the value of your vote. India has very low inter-state migration, which means that internal migration is too small to even out the value of the vote.

Fiscal Federalism in India

In the US, states lose and win seats in the House all the time along with their electoral votes. Redistricting, as it is called, is done on the basis of population. 538 has a good rundown on the most recent redistricting process. You do see some political scuffles around this, but not at the scale you see in India.

India has a federal structure to its polity too. So why do readjustments trigger intense political battles? Amit Shah had to reassure the southern states that they wouldn’t lose any seats in the upcoming delimitation. DMK supremo Stalin has called an all-party meet on March 5th, 2025 to discuss delimitation.

One of the reasons is the lack of fiscal federalism to go along with political federalism. A State’s share of the Centre’s revenue is determined by the Finance Commission. 41% of the Centre’s revenue is shared with the states³, but there have been rumblings that this share will be cut to 40%. States have sources of revenue like excise duty, VAT or stamp duty, but more than half their revenue comes from the Centre.

Out of the total revenue of the states, more than half comes from the Centre. Chart credit: thehindu.com

Only the Lok Sabha has the power to pass money bills and while the Rajya Sabha can send over recommendations on such bills, they aren’t binding on the Lok Sabha. With reduced representation in the Lok Sabha, the five southern states have valid concerns about a reduced say in spending. The flipside of fertility decline is an increase in the elderly population, which leads to an increase in in healthcare and social security expenditure. As a states population skews older, tax revenues will tend to fall exacerbating the problem.

Because partition was such a traumatic incident and the founders of the country were trying to build a nation while getting the princely states into the union, India ended up with a very strong Centre — reducing the space for secessionist adventurism by the newly forged states⁴. Because of this, while India is a political federation, it’s almost a unitary polity when it comes to finances.

One Person, One Vote

While designing the constitution, Dr. Ambedkar strongly propounded the principle of ‘One Person, One Vote’. It meant that each person’s vote should weigh the same. As an example, if constituency A had 10 people compared to constituency B’s 100 people, then each person’s vote in constituency A would have 10 times as much weight as a person’s vote in constituency B.

Why was this important? In a polity racked with socio-political tensions over caste and religion, enshrining political equality goes a long way to keep a nation united. Malapportionment of constituencies damages this fundamental principle.

It raises resentment between states and between various groups in the state. Population doesn’t grow evenly between a state. Rich areas will see lower fertility while poorer areas will see higher population growth. Thankfully, the 84th Amendment to the Constitution allowed states to redraw boundaries for their Lok Sabha constituencies within their borders eliminating intra-state malapportionment.

Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hinston’s solution

There have been some solutions proposed by political theorists, but all of them require some sort of compromise by the southern states in the Lok Sabha.

Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hinston do an analysis on the amount of malapportionment in the Lok Sabha. I took the graph below from their article on delimitation for Carnegie Endowment⁵.

Sizing up by population, Tamil Nadu is overrepresented by 8 seats and Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are underrepresented by 10 and 11 seats. That’s a hefty loss to their power in the Lok Sabha.

Their solution is to expand the size of the House rather than reapportion the current number of seats, such that no state loses the raw number of seats it has in the House. So the nominal strength of each state remains the same, but it loses its proportional strength. Milan and Hinston calculate that the Lok Sabha would need to have 848 members to achieve this⁶. It is politically feasible with the real effect being that one MP now represents about 1.7 million people each.

The real kicker in their solution is their proposal to reform the Rajya Sabha. Elect Rajya Sabha MPs directly instead of through a collegium and fix the number of seats of each state in the Rajya Sabha. But this isn’t politically feasible at all. The current administration has a tenuous majority in the Rajya Sabha through its coalition and it wouldn’t like to give that up.

The advantage of Rajya Sabha reforms is that while states lose in proportional representation, they still have power in the Upper House that they can use for negotiations with the Centre.

Shruti Rajagopalan’s solution

On the Seen and the Unseen podcast, Shruti has an informative chat about delimitation with Amit Verma. She elaborates later in a Substack post⁷ on the various theories she has come up with.

Her main suggestion is that the Rajya Sabha be transformed completely into a “Revenue Sabha”. Essentially, the more revenue a state earns the more seats it earns in the Rajya Sabha⁸. It’s refreshingly inventive and aligns incentives of states with that of the union!

But, it cannot happen in India. For this to work, the Rajya Sabha would need to have the power to pass money bills. If it doesn’t have the power, then states can just ignore their representation in the Rajya Sabha. Neither the BJP or the Congress will be interested in this particular reform. Getting a majority in the Rajya Sabha is tough and it would be tougher in the new “Revenue Sabha”. It puts down a lot of institutional brakes⁹ that neither party would be interested in dealing with. Importantly, it would have repercussions in the Lok Sabha for UP and Bihar which would threaten the current government’s dominance.

My take

In an ideal world, I would take Shruti’s solution outlined above because the design is innovative and aligns incentives of all actors in the system. Realistically, it has a snowball’s chance in hell of making it through. So what could a solution look like?

The main observation here is that states are fighting over representation primarily because fiscal resources are scarce. Kerala doesn’t care much about the Union government if it sticks to defence, foreign policy or roads and railways. When the Union government ties the funds it receives to its performance in Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS)¹⁰, that’s when it becomes concerned of its voice in the Parliament. With the proliferation of such schemes in PM Modi’s term, they have become a vehicle for the Centre to influence expenditure of states outside the Finance Commission mandated devolutions.

The best solution here is threefold:

1. Perform the seat apportionment and increase the total number of seats in the Lok Sabha to about 850. This reduces the MP to population ratio while keeping the number of MPs manageable.

   

   A comparison of the seats in bicameral legislatures of various Western democracies. Chart taken from a previous post

2. Increase the vertical devolution of funds to the states. Currently, the Finance Commission mandates devolving 41% of the funds to the states. It could gradually increase to about 50%. That gives the states much higher say in development and reduces the political fights in the Lok Sabha.

3. Empower states to raise revenue through tax on income.

Aiming to solve the entire political bottleneck through a single burst of reforms will throw the polity into disarray. Incrementalism works best here, delivered in small doses. Over a decade or two, these incentives would work to favor higher development and less dependence on Centre. As a bonus, the increased fiscal federalism will reduce Centre-State fights and revenue sharing arguments with other states.

1. I have a theory that this is why the census was delayed. The usual decadal census was supposed to be held in 2021, but was ostensibly postponed due to lockdown and the after effects of Covid. The Modi government must have anticipated a stronger mandate and might have wanted to use its brutal majority to force a favourable delimitation. Because delimitation didn’t kick until the first census after 2026 — which would be the 2031 census — delaying the 2021 census until 2026 would allow them to redistrict Lok Sabha when they were in a stronger position.

2. A population of approximately 1.5 billion and 550 seats in the Lok Sabha.

3. If you want to google more, the relevant term is vertical devolution.

4. This assumes even more significance considering that Hyderabad, Junagadh and Kashmir had to be arm twisted into submission. My conjecture is that giving a US like fiscal autonomy to these states would have resulted in only a flimsy connection with the Centre.

5. Refer: https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2019/03/indias-emerging-crisis-of-representation?lang=en

6. The new Parliament can accommodate 888 seats in the Lok Sabha and 300 seats in the Rajya Sabha.

7. The Substack post can be found here and the podcast episode can be found here.

8. Go read her post to learn more about it. It is very informative and covers much more detail than I can here.

9. Although the counter-argument here is that institutional brakes are needed.

10. All the flagship schemes announced by the PM Modi have usually been Centrally Sponsored Schemes. These include schemes like MGNREGA and PM Gram Sadak Yojana. They often encroach on state subjects.