Demystifying the Delimitation Dilemma

Ravi K Mishra's deeply researched book—Demography, Representation, Delimitation—dissects India's demographic transitions, regional disparities, and political representation debates, offering bold insights and practical frameworks ahead of the 2026 delimitation reckoning

- Sanjeev Chopra

That the book is informative, engaging, provocative and rooted 'in the context of the contemporary' is clear from the cover itself: the font size of Demography is bigger than that of Representation and Delimitation. The sub title of the book draws from the oft quoted political formulation about the North South divide, as if the east and the west did not matter at all. However, As Ravi K Mishra points out, over the last century and a half — all the four regions of the country: north, south, east and west — have enjoyed phases of peak population growth lasting four to five decades, but the timings of the demographic transition in the four regions, and the states within each has been very different.

The book takes us back to the dominant construct of the seventies when the most conspicuous wall paintings, hoardings, cinema show slides and popular literature often featured the slogans: hum do, hamare do, or bus do yaa teen bachhe, lagte hain ghar mein acche. RK Narayan, India's best-loved English fiction writer, set his novel "The Painter of Signs" in his fictional town of Malgudi. The story follows Raman, a perfectionist in painting wall hoardings, who becomes enamoured with Daisy — a well-heeled activist. She takes him under her wing as they travel through the countryside, painting slogans aimed at controlling the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of women in what was then pejoratively referred to as the 'cow belt' or the "BIMARU" states: Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. At the time, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Uttarakhand had not yet been carved out of Bihar, MP, and UP.