How should India redistribute seats in an expanded Lok Sabha?
The defeat of the 131st Constitutional Amendment Bill in Parliament on April 16 has reignited the debate about delimitation – redrawing the boundaries of electoral constituencies to ensure that the share of the population is distributed fairly among them.
The bill sought to increase the maximum representation in the Lok Sabha to 850.
The delimitation bill failed to secure the required two-thirds majority in Parliament because it sought to carry out delimitation based on the 2011 Census, effectively bypassing the constitutional requirement to wait for the first Census after 2026, which was already underway.
In addition, Southern states maintained that they would be penalised by delimitation. They point out that their success in controlling population growth compared to Northern states could reduce their share of representation in an enlarged parliament.
Since the delimitation bill has been defeated, the task of finding a solution to the challenge of redrawing the boundaries of constituencies to ensure fair representation is more urgent now than ever.
Perhaps India could take a lesson from Europe and look to its "Cambridge compromise" of 2011 as it decides how the seats of an enlarged Lok Sabha should be apportioned among the Indian states and Union Territories.
There is no doubt that the Lok Sabha needs to be expanded. Currently, 1.5 billion Indians are represented by just 543 MPs, each of whom represents roughly 2.8 million people. Every Indian MP represents a population approximately the size of Qatar.
By contrast, the European Parliament, representing approximately 450 million people, has 720 members. This means that each Member of the European Parliament represents approximately 625,000 people.
According to Article 82 of the Indian Constitution, the Delimitation Commission is entrusted with the task of redrawing the constituencies based on the data of the most recent census. This practice was followed until the 1970s. Constituencies were redrawn to account for decadal changes due to natural increases in population and migration.
However, this provision meant that states that had a higher fertility rate would enjoy greater political representation across generations. This contradicted the Indira Gandhi government's population control objective.
As a consequence, in 1976, through the 42nd Amendment, Parliamentary seats that were determined by the 1971 Census were frozen till the 2001 Census so that states were not penalised for effectively executing family planning programmes. This freeze was later extended till 2026, working on the assumption that all the states would have stabilised their population growth by this point.
This has created a discrepancy between the number of voters per constituency: the sole MP of Lakshadweep represents approximately 60,000 voters but MPs in Rajasthan represent approximately 3 million voters. This violates the parity in the value of the vote of each elector.
In 1971, the states of Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh (undivided, including Chhattisgarh) had a population parity of about 42 million people. As a result, Tamil Nadu got 39 seats and Madhya Pradesh has 37. Now, according to the 2011 Census, the present population of Madhya Pradesh is slightly more than that of Tamil Nadu. But while Madhya Pradesh has 29 seats, Tamil Nadu has 39.
Europe offers a useful model for parliamentary representation.
In many respects, the European Union and India are similar. Both have a socially and culturally diverse population. Members of the European Parliament are elected by direct universal suffrage, for five-year terms, like in India.
The principle of "digressive proportionality" used to determine the distribution of the 720 seats in the European Parliament among the 27 member-states could be localised to the Indian context.
In the European Parliament, more populous member-states each have more seats than small ones, but smaller member-states have more seats per population.
According to this principle, the representation ratios of member states – that is, the population figure divided by the number of seats before rounding – decrease from a more populous member state to a less populous member state.
While the Netherlands has more seats overall, with 31 compared to Denmark's 15, each Dutch MEP represents around 590,000 people, compared to about 400,000 per Danish MEP.
The Lisbon Treaty of 2007 added another safeguard by setting the maximum number of seats to 96 for the largest member-state of Germany and the minimum number to six for the smallest member-states of Malta, Luxembourg and Cyprus.
To achieve this, the Committee on Constitutional Affairs of the European Parliament commissioned a group of mathematicians to recommend a formula that would apportion the seats of the among member states in a manner that was "durable, transparent and impartial to politics".
This led to the publication in 2011 of the "Cambridge Compromise" , which was drafted abiding by the constraints set by the Lisbon Treaty. The recommendations proposed a two-step process termed the " base+prop method".
Under this formula, in the first stage, a fixed number of seats is allocated to each country. In the second stage, the remainder is distributed proportionally to population sizes with upwards rounding. This rule does not apply to the most and least populous countries, for which a maximum ceiling and minimum floor is predetermined.
Though the Cambridge Compromise was rejected after Brexit in 2020 in favour of a "pragmatic solution" where no European Union country loses any seats and underrepresented countries gained between one and five seats, it could be adjusted and localised to the Indian context.
In the Indian case, the seats for the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh could be capped, with a similar floor applied for the least populated states and Union Territories. The principle of degressive proportionality could be applied to the other states and Union Territories, with the larger states having more seats in total, but the small states receiving more seats per capita.
This is not to say that this system does not have critics. Despite the composition of the European Parliament broadly adhering to the principle of degressive proportionality, some scholars say it is a highly unequal parliament.
They argue that smaller member states are overrepresented, leading to a "structural democratic deficit" in the European Union.
In the Indian context, however, the bigger challenge would be to garner the political will to enact such dramatic parliamentary reforms.
Irrespective of the solution adopted, it's clear that India should utilise this opportunity to reform representation in the Parliament in a way that protects the interests of smaller states while simultaneously distributing seats to reflect population differences.
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