As the dust settles down after the stormy special session of Parliament on April 16-17, and as the rhetoric gives way to cold logic and sober reflection, it is clear that something astonishing has happened.

Women getting one-third of the seats in the Lok Sabha and Legislative Assemblies for fifteen years is already enshrined in the Constitution through the 106th Amendment. The two key provisions that were sought to be incorporated in the failed 131st Amendment Bill are about delinking the allocation of seats and delimitation of constituencies from the 2026 census and increasing the strength of Lok Sabha by fifty per cent.

Delimitation of constituencies without waiting for the 2026 Census has the merit of expediting the process and ensuring that it is completed before the 2029 Lok Sabha election. Over the past 25 years, because of rapid urbanisation, there is growing disparity in the size of constituencies. For instance, the population of Malkajgiri in the Greater Hyderabad area of Telangana exceeds 5 million; about 90 countries in the world are smaller than this one Lok Sabha constituency! Therefore, delimitation is necessary.

The defeated Bills have only given Parliament the power to decide the year of the census as a basis for delimitation; the official statements in Parliament indicate that for the purpose of delimitation, the last available census data of 2011 will form the basis in order to complete the process in time for 2029.

Increasing the strength of the Lok Sabha seems to have engaged the attention of many, but it has no direct bearing on either women's reservation or allocation of seats to states. Given the vast increase in our population, increasing the number of representatives........

© Free Press Journal