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When the 131st Constitutional Amendment Bill did not secure passage in the Lok Sabha this past April, it brought into sharp focus a structural tension that has long needed careful policy attention: how does a democracy meaningfully expand its legislative house after five decades, while preserving the federal compact that holds it together?

The drafters of that Bill undertook an exceptionally complex exercise, simultaneously proposing an expansion to 850 seats and offering assurance to Southern states that their decades of demographic stabilisation would not translate into diminished political voice. That these two objectives proved difficult to reconcile in a single legislative instrument is not a failure of intent; it is a signal that the underlying framework requires a cleaner conceptual separation. This article argues that the path forward lies in disaggregating two constitutionally distinct democratic requirements, the vertical question of how seats are distributed between states, and the horizontal question of how boundaries are drawn within them, and applying the most appropriate, transparent principle to each.

Vertical: Preserving the federal balance between states

It is understandable that initial policy thinking gravitated toward a nationally uniform, census-driven approach to seat apportionment. Tying representation directly to the population carries an intuitive democratic logic. However, when applied at the inter-state level under present demographic realities, this approach produces outcomes that are structurally inequitable and arguably contrary to the spirit of India’s federal design.

Southern states currently hold approximately 23.8% of Lok Sabha seats, a share that has been protected through a freeze on constituency delimitation since 1976. Their relative demographic position has shifted substantially since then: fertility transitions achieved earlier in the South mean that a 2027 census-driven reapportionment would mechanically reduce the South’s share of national representation, not because of any policy failing, but precisely because of a public health and social development success. It is worth noting that while the 2011 census already under-represents Southern states relative to their 1971 baseline, the forthcoming 2027 census is likely to accentuate this trend........

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