33% seat reservation: Govt looks at quota for women in next Lok Sabha polls

Indian Express

a day ago

The Modi government intends to roll out reservation of seats for women, which is linked to the delimitation exercise, in the 2029 Lok Sabha elections, highly-placed sources said Wednesday.
Official sources said the government is targeting implementation of the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam that reserves one-third of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies in the next election.
'The Census has been announced and the other steps will follow. The women's reservation Bill is linked to the delimitation process. We are aiming to roll it out in the next election,' sources in the government said.
According to the Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-Eighth Amendment) Bill, 2023, the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, passed in September 2023, reservation of one-third of seats for women in Lok Sabha and state Assemblies shall come into effect after an exercise of delimitation is undertaken based on figures from the first Census that is conducted after the enactment of the Act.
Earlier this month, the government announced that the process of data collection for the Census, along with caste enumeration, would commence next year and offer a snapshot of the country's population as on March 1, 2027.
For women's reservation to become a reality in the next Lok Sabha elections, delimitation will have to be completed well in time for the Election Commission of India to conduct the 2029 polls on the basis of the new delimitation of constituencies.
Government sources claimed that the Census data will be available faster than the previous time with the advancement of technology – the enumeration will be conducted digitally using mobile applications for data collection and a central portal to collate the details and manage it.
The Census data is significant for delimitation because the process of readjusting the seats of Lok Sabha and state Assemblies and redrawing their territorial boundaries is expected to be launched once the data is available.
There have been concerns among southern states regarding delimitation changing the proportion of seats allocated to various states in Lok Sabha to conform to the constitutional principle of 'one person, one vote, one value', which will lead to a jump in seats for the northern states where populations have grown briskly since 1971 and reduce the relative weight of southern states where the population rate has slowed down in the same period.
Senior ministers have said that the concerns expressed by the southern states will be addressed, and that no room for complaints will be left.
In February this year, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had said that the southern states would not lose even a single seat on a pro-rata basis, making A Raja of the DMK ask whether pro-rata meant population-based or based on the present number of constituencies.
Later, at the RSS's Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha meet at Bengaluru, RSS joint general secretary K Mukunda said the share of seats of the southern states would be maintained as it is in case the number of Lok Sabha seats is increased via delimitation.
However, NDA ally Upendra Kushwaha has already made 'justice for Bihar', through allocation of seats as per present population share, as a poll plank for the Bihar Assembly elections, taking the line multiple times in Bihar and Delhi.
For delimitation to happen after the next Census, Parliament will have to pass a Delimitation Act, which will constitute a Delimitation Commission for the exercise that is likely to lead to an increase in Lok Sabha seats. Article 82 of the Constitution mandates readjustment of seats after every Census.
However, the present Lok Sabha reflects the population figures of the 1971 Census because the delimitation of seats was frozen in 1976 for 25 years, and in 2001 for another 25 years, through Constitutional amendments, with the Vajpayee government stating in 2002 that this would provide an incentive for family planning.
If another Constitutional amendment is not passed by Parliament by 2026, the freeze on delimitation will automatically be over.
Under Article 81(2) (a) of the Constitution, 'there shall be allotted to each State a number of seats in the House of the People in such manner that the ratio between that number and the population of the state is, so far as practicable, the same for all States'. The only exception to this rule are small states whose population do not exceed six million.