India's Delimitation Dilemmas Go Beyond Unequal Representation

Demographic changes give the Lok Sabha a representational bias while overlarge constituencies amplify majoritarianism

- SANJOY CHAKRAVORTY

In 2026, India is supposed to go through a delimitation exercise to re-allocate seats in the Lok Sabha. It was originally mandated to take place every 10 years, after every census, to account for population changes arising from state-to-state differences in fertility rates and migration. However, the political implications of delimitation are so serious that it became, like a caste census (last undertaken in 1931), the third rail of Indian politics. You touch it, you die. As a result, the delimitation exercise has not been carried out for over five decades. Now, after two generations of massive demographic changes from natural increase and migration, the associated political problems have become even more intractable.

To uphold the core democratic principle of equal representation, each seat in the Lok Sabha is constitutionally mandated to represent roughly the same number of people. Therefore, the number of Lok Sabha seats from a given state should be proportional to its population. But, as is well known, the Total Fertility Rates (TFR) in south and north Indian states have followed very different trajectories over the past half century. A TFR of 2.1 represents 'replacement level fertility,' meaning a population is producing just enough offspring to replace itself; neither more, nor less. All South Indian states—Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka—have a TFR well below 2.1, whereas the levels are considerably higher in several large northern states like Bihar (TFR: 3) and Uttar Pradesh (TFR: 2.4).