Delimitation - I of II

Article 81 of the Indian Constitution requires that for the Lok Sabha, seats are allocated in a way “that the ratio between that number and the population of the state is, so far as practicable, the same for all states.” And since populations grow, and not evenly across all constituencies, Article 82 provided for redistricting based on the numbers from each census which takes place every ten years.

As a result of this stipulation, the number of constituencies, their size in each state, and their boundaries are determined periodically, an exercise known as delimitation. Delimitation Commissions, separate from an Election Commission that conducts elections, are set up to study how the country’s demographics are changing, based on census data. This decides how many new constituencies need to be added/subtracted in a given state, and/or how their boundaries need to be changed.

This system worked reasonably well in the first two decades post-independence. Then problems started creeping in. The Forty-Second Amendment to the Indian Constitution in 1976 froze the number and boundary of constituencies in the Lok Sabha according to the population numbers from the 1971 census. The freeze was fixed for a period of 25 years, until the 2001 census. When the time came to revisit the issue in 2001, the Vajpayee government brought in the Eighty-Fourth Amendment which postponed the decision until the publication of the census figures after 2026 (which is expected in 2031).

The reason for this freeze initially was uneven population growth. The politicians from southern states of India claimed that they more strictly and successfully followed the Union government’s population control mandate compared to the northern states. As a consequence, they alleged, that they were electorally and politically penalized for complying with the Union government mandate. The Vajpayee government postponed the revision due to the fragile nature of the coalition. 

But the actual issue was not about population or people; it was about money. The Indian system operates primarily through intergovernmental transfers managed by the Union government. There’s considerable variation among the states on their fiscal dependence on the Union government, largely based on the variation in states’ gross domestic product (GSDP) per capita. Even after intergovernmental transfers from the Union government, low-income states spend less than high-income states. But high-income states don’t enjoy all the revenue that is raised off the income and productivity of those states.

The southern states, with wealthier residents, contributed more to the collective Indian revenue pool. The Union government redistributed resources based on need, and the poorer states, with higher fertility rates and therefore higher population and population growth, received a much larger share of the revenue than they generated within the state. The liberalization of the economy since 1991 led to a higher growth rate for all states, but not at the same rate. The southern and western states grew faster, and coupled with the drop in fertility rates,  difference from the northern states have become even more stark since 2001.

The asymmetry between the shares of electoral constituencies relative to the shares of the population for the state is known as malapportionment. After 50 years of dilly-dallying, we are now in a situation where a registered voter in UP is most underrepresented (one seat per 30 lakh registered voters in 2019) while a registered voter in Tamil Nadu is most overrepresented (one seat per 18 lakh registered voters). Interestingly, a study indicates that there were more actual voters per constituency in TN than in UP on average in 2014. It perhaps indicates that a large number of registered voters in UP have migrated outside their constituencies but still remain registered there.

At present, Indian parliamentarians answer to vastly larger sums of people than their counterparts in literally every other democracy: Indian MPs represent an average of 2.5 million citizens - over three times the number represented by members of the House of Representatives in the United States, which ranks second. For example, in Bihar, one Member of Parliament (MP) represents approximately 3.1 million citizens and an Uttar Pradesh MP represents approximately 2.96 million citizens. At the other end of the spectrum, a Tamil Nadu MP represents approximately 1.97 million citizens and a Kerala MP represents approximately 1.75 million citizens.

Tamil Nadu has nine seats more and Kerala has six seats more than what would have been the number of seats if it had been allocated according to their population proportion. While Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, respectively, have nine seats and twelve seats less than their population proportion. By 2031, when the delimitation freeze ends, the problem will only intensify.