Delimitation of parliamentary constituencies: India
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A backgrounder
As of 2025 March
Anjishnu Das, March 10, 2025: The Indian Express
When delimitation Bill was moved in 1972 — based on a formula that Stalin has said should be adhered to — MPs across party lines debated ideal Parliament strength, and if increasing Assembly seats was the answer.
A delimitation storm is brewing in the South with Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin opposing the population-based exercise over fears that southern states would lose out on the Lok Sabha seats. At an all-party meeting that he held in Chennai on Wednesday, Stalin said the 1971 Census should remain the basis for any allocation of seats through delimitation for 30 more years beyond 2026.
Stalin contended that if the number of Parliamentary seats is to be increased, the proportion of seats for each state should be based on the proportional ratio of 1971. This would ensure that even if the number of Lok Sabha seats is raised above the current 543, the states get the same share of seats that they got as per the 1971 Census.
India has completed a delimitation exercise just four times – in 1952, 1963, 1973 and 2002. But the 1973 delimitation was the last time the number of Lok Sabha seats was raised. In the 2002 exercise, merely the constituency boundaries were redrawn without changing the number of seats allotted to states.
In the 1952 delimitation, the cap on the Lok Sabha seats was set at 500. A decade later, in 1963, this was raised to 525 owing to an increase in the average population per constituency.
In the 1973 exercise, the maximum number of the Lok Sabha seats was raised to 545 to account for population growth and the formation of new states. The then Delimitation Commission also went about reapportioning the 545 seats, of which 525 were allotted to states and 20 to Union Territories (UTs). Through the process, no state lost any seats, even as 13 states gained seats while the remaining 18 states and UTs remained unchanged.
The biggest gainers in 1973 were Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, each getting an additional three seats. Gujarat, Rajasthan and West Bengal gained two seats. Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, Odisha, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh each got one additional seat.
However, Tamil Nadu’s tally remained unchanged at 39, as did Uttar Pradesh’s (which at the time included Uttarakhand) at 85.
But these changes had followed intense debates in Parliament during the passage of the Delimitation Act, 1972 and the Constitution (31st Amendment) Act, 1973 under the then Indira Gandhi-led Congress government, which raised the cap on the maximum Lok Sabha seats.
In December 1972, Nitiraj Singh Chaudhary, then Minister of State for Law and Justice, introduced the delimitation Bill in the Lok Sabha amid criticism from sections of both the ruling and the Opposition MPs.
E R Krishnan, the DMK MP from Salem, criticised the Bill for disregarding the progress made on family planning measures to limit population growth. While pointing out that Tamil Nadu had lost two Lok Sabha seats through the previous 1963 delimitation exercise – dropping from 41 to 39 – Krishnan said, “The Central government repeatedly stresses that unless the population explosion is controlled, economic development will be in jeopardy. If any state follows this directive and implements family planning programmes, the state is deprived of due representation in the Lok Sabha. If this is going to be the reward for implementing family planning programmes then… some states might even drop the programmes.”
Though the DMK, then in the Opposition, had supported increasing the number of Lok Sabha seats to 570 following an all-party meeting with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, mainly due to the difficulty of representing increasingly populous constituencies, Krishnan’s remarks at the time seemed to find an echo in Stalin’s current argument. “I would request that the pre-1961 basis for demarcating the Lok Sabha seats and Assembly in the case of Tamil Nadu should be followed for the purpose of delimiting the constituencies now,” Krishnan said.
In effect, Krishnan sought that the proportions of the 1951 Census-based delimitation be retained in the next delimitation exercise. Similarly, Stalin is now arguing for the 1971 Census, which gave Tamil Nadu 39 seats, to be retained as the basis for any future reapportionment of seats, even if the maximum strength of the Lok Sabha is increased.
But, during the 1972 Lok Sabha debate, several members outright opposed increasing the tally of the Lok Sabha seats. Samar Guha, the Praja Socialist Party (PSP) MP from West Bengal’s Contai, called the 570 figure arbitrary and warned of the “slippery slope” of routinely raising the number of Lok Sabha seats based on population. “Representation cannot be proportional to the rate of growth of population. 570 may be possible in 1981, but in 1991 the numbers will grow and after 20 or 30 years this number will have to be increased to 1,000. The House of the People will turn into a mela or a bazaar,” Guha said.
However, several MPs batted for an increase in the number of seats, despite concerns over seating space in the Lok Sabha, issues in data collection, and threats of “politically motivated reallocation” of seats.
S M Banerjee, an Independent MP from Kanpur, was among those in favour of raising the cap on the Lok Sabha seats owing to the growing population of each constituency. “If one has to manage 10 or 12 lakhs of voters, MPs will have no personal contact with the people,” Banerjee said.
Several Congress MPs, too, echoed Banerjee’s contention. B V Naik, the MP from Karnataka’s Kanara, said, “The size of the electorate will make it progressively difficult – particularly at the national level – to maintain a rapport with the electorate composed of as many as a million people, because we are already 56 crore of people.”
But months later, when the Constitution (31st Amendment) Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha in May 1973, raising the maximum membership of the House to 545, several MPs said the figure was arbitrary and not in line with what was envisioned by the framers of the Constitution.
Among those opposing the Constitutional Amendment was Vikram Mahajan, the Congress MP from Himachal Pradesh’s Kangra. “Will you reward the states who have not implemented the family planning programme? … Those states that have failed to implement family planning should be penalised in that their representatives should have to represent a larger number of people,” Mahajan said.
In this debate, too, the PSP’s Samar Guha was a critic of the Bill. “It may so happen that our population will double itself in 20 years or 30 years or 40 years. It may even reach 100 crores after some years. Are we to bound our future generations by this act of ours? It is a problem for the future generations to solve,” he said.
While some MPs, including Jagannathrao Joshi of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), the predecessor of the BJP, said a “Lakshma rekha” should be set for the strength of the Lok Sabha, others said the focus should instead be on raising the cap in the state Assemblies given India’s federal structure.
Several MPs also pitched for a new electoral system. “We have been pressing for a change in the system of election, namely from direct election to proportional representation. Otherwise, we do not get the real choice of the people reflected in the results of the elections… Merely increasing the number of MPs will not solve the problem,” said S M Banerjee. He also said that without electoral reforms, the approach to delimitation would remain partisan, adding “I am very sorry to say that the Election Commission has become one of those sets of committed persons who are trying to help the government.”
Guha raised similar concerns, saying, “Seats are going to be increased for limited and conspiratorial purposes… We have an apprehension that this party in power (Congress)… wants to readjust constituencies in such a way that the Opposition should not be able to have their voice in the national forum of this country.”
However, Law Minister Nitiraj Chaudhary dismissed these concerns, especially over the raised cap of 545 seats. “To ensure that states do not lose their present representation, we had to work out the figure… If my honourable friends had worked it out, they would find that 525 is the only figure at which we can preserve the present representation for the big and the small states (not including UTs)… This Bill only seeks to prevent this adverse effect. This Bill is not based on an increase in population,” he said at the end of the debate.
The Amendment was subsequently put to a vote and passed by the Lok Sabha, officially raising its strength to 545.
Ultimately, many of the concerns around the routine increases to the Lok Sabha’s strength were put to rest in 1976 with the 42nd Amendment to the Constitution, which froze the number of Lok Sabha seats and deferred delimitation for 25 years until the 2001 Census. The Congress government at the time, during the Emergency era, cited “family planning policies” as the reason for this move.
In 2002, under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government, the 84th Constitutional Amendment was passed, which also froze the number of the Lok Sabha seats and put off delimitation “until the first Census taken after the year 2026”.
While the 2021 Census was put off due to the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2024, each Lok Sabha seat had an average 17.84 lakh electors, according to the Election Commission (EC). In the 1977 Lok Sabha polls, which marked the first elections on the basis of the 1971 Census, each seat had an average 5.93 lakh voters, as per the EC figures.
