Three Ways Out Of Delimitation Labyrinth

Dislocation between economic prosperity and political clout poses an existential threat to India. Kicking the problem to the future would be abdication of patriotic duty

- Rathin Roy Distinguished Professor, Kautilya School of Public Policy, Hyderabad; Visiting Senior Fellow, Overseas Development Institute, London

ANY eminent people have been writing about the delimitation problem that is an important dimension of the divide between the peninsula and the Great Indian Plain (GIP), a polite geographical term for northern and eastern India.

The proposals to address the problem—kick it to 2051, create different representation structures, etc—are all technocratic. However, delimitation is a political economy issue, and can only be addressed through a change in the extant political settlement that underpins the foundations of India's democracy.

Let me define the issue as I see it. The majority of voting Indians live in the GIP; a minority live in the peninsula. This problem has worsened over time due to divergent fertility rates. In parallel, a new divergence has emerged: the economic prosperity of the peninsula is now several times greater than that of the GIP. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have per capita incomes lower than Nepal's and human development indicators that rank alongside poor African countries. Tamil Nadu and Kerala have per capita incomes three times higher than those GIP states', and human development levels comparable with upper-middle-income countries'.

This is a fairly rare situation. In federal polities like the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Indonesia and the European Union, the economically prosperous regions are also where the majorities live. Hence, political and economic powers are synchronized. It is only in the former USSR and the former Yugoslavia that I observe the Indian case replicated.