Author: Chandramani Bhaskar, ILS Law College, Pune
TO THE POINT
India’s Lok Sabha seats have been distributed among States on the basis of the 1971 Census for over five decades. The freeze, first imposed by the Forty-Second Amendment and extended by the Eighty-Fourth Amendment, was meant to be temporary. It expires with the first Census taken after 2026, and the census currently underway will decide what comes next.
The stakes are simple to state and hard to settle. States such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have grown fast since 1971 and would gain seats if representation is redrawn on today’s population. States such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala slowed their population growth decades ago, in part because they invested early in education and health, and stand to lose seats for that very success.
In April 2026, the government moved to end the freeze through the Constitution (One Hundred and Thirty-First Amendment) Bill, 2026, along with the Delimitation Bill, 2026. The bills fell short of the two-thirds majority needed and were withdrawn.
The question they raised was not withdrawn along with them. This paper looks at that question through the Constitution, the case law, and the numbers.
USE OF LEGAL JARGON
A short glossary is useful before the argument proceeds. Delimitation is the exercise of fixing the number of seats in each State and drawing constituency boundaries so that seats carry roughly equal population, under a Delimitation Commission constituted by Parliament. Malapportionment describes the opposite condition, where constituencies of very unequal population elect the same number of representatives, so that one voter’s ballot carries more weight than another’s.
An ouster clause is a constitutional or statutory provision that bars courts from examining a particular class of decision. Article 329(a) is one such clause: it states that the validity of any law relating to delimitation or the allotment of seats cannot be questioned in any court. Judicial review is the power of constitutional courts to examine State action against the Constitution, a power the Supreme Court has held survives even an ouster clause where the action is manifestly arbitrary.
Degressive proportionality is an allocation method under which smaller units receive a somewhat larger share of seats than their population alone would justify, so that a State’s voice in the legislature does not shrink in direct proportion to slower population growth. Cooperative federalism refers to the constitutional design under which the Union and the States function as partners rather than as strictly separate or competing authorities, a design the delimitation debate tests directly.
THE PROOF
The numbers explain why this debate has become so heated. Between the 1971 and 2011 Censuses, Uttar Pradesh’s population rose from roughly 8.4 crore to close to 20 crore, while Kerala’s population grew far more slowly over the same period. Projections built on 2026 population estimates suggest that, if seats were reallocated purely by headcount while keeping the Lok Sabha at 543 seats, Uttar Pradesh could gain around eleven seats and Bihar around ten, while Tamil Nadu and Kerala could each lose roughly eight. If the House were instead expanded to 848 seats along the lines proposed in 2026, Uttar Pradesh’s gain could run to about sixty-three seats and Bihar’s to about thirty-nine, against a gain of only about ten for Tamil Nadu and none at all for Kerala.
The Constitution (One Hundred and Thirty-First Amendment) Bill, 2026, proposed raising the Lok Sabha’s maximum strength from 550 to 850 seats, with up to 815 seats for the States and 35 for Union Territories. It was put to a vote during a special session held from 16 to 18 April 2026. Of 528 members present, 298 voted in favour and 230 against, fifty-four votes short of the required two-thirds majority, and the connected bills were withdrawn.
A further complication sits inside the population data itself. The National Family Health Survey-5 recorded Karnataka’s sex ratio at birth at 978 females per 1,000 males, close to the natural rate, against 893 in Haryana and 941 in Uttar Pradesh. A count that rewards higher population growth with more seats does not distinguish between growth driven by births and growth shaped by decades of skewed sex ratios at birth in parts of the country. This is a demographic fact that any formula built on raw headcounts has to reckon with, whatever position one takes on the wider federalism question.
The Total Fertility Rate tells a related story. Kerala and Tamil Nadu brought their fertility rates below replacement level decades before most northern States, largely through sustained investment in girls’ education, healthcare access, and family planning. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are only now approaching replacement level. A seat formula keyed strictly to current population effectively asks these southern States to answer for a demographic transition they completed early, while States still completing that transition are rewarded with additional representation for every year the transition takes. Any credible reform has to decide, openly, whether that trade-off is one Parliament is willing to make.
The Census Act, 1948, itself ties fresh delimitation to the first Census taken after the constitutional freeze lifts. The reference date for the ongoing Census has been fixed as 1 March 2027, meaning the legal trigger for delimitation will not be pulled until census figures are formally published, expected sometime after 2027.
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the constitutional and political dimensions of India’s approaching delimitation exercise. It traces the freeze on parliamentary seat allocation from the Forty-Second Amendment through the Eighty-Fourth Amendment, and asks what should happen once that freeze lifts after the first Census taken beyond 2026. The paper argues that a straightforward, population-only formula, while faithful to the one-person-one-vote principle, would penalise States that met national population-control goals and could unsettle the federal balance the Constitution was designed to protect. It reviews the leading cases on judicial review of delimitation orders, from Meghraj Kothari to the 2024 ruling in Kishorchandra Chhanganlal Rathod, to show how the courts have gradually narrowed the ouster clause in Article 329(a) without discarding it. Drawing on the 2026 legislative debate over the Constitution (One Hundred and Thirty-First Amendment) Bill and its eventual defeat, the paper concludes that any lasting resolution will need a formula that respects demographic reality without abandoning the smaller, slower-growing States that delimitation was frozen to protect in the first place.
CASE LAWS
Meghraj Kothari v. Delimitation Commission remains the starting point for any discussion of judicial review in this field. A voter from Ujjain challenged a notification reserving his constituency for Scheduled Castes, arguing that the notification was not a law within the meaning of Article 327 and could therefore be tested in court. The Supreme Court disagreed and read Article 329(a) broadly, holding that any order made under the Delimitation Commission Act, 1962, once published, could not be reopened before a court. The Court’s reasoning rested on the practical need to hold elections on schedule; allowing every notification to be litigated would have made that impossible.
For decades, Meghraj Kothari was treated as laying down an almost total bar. That reading was tempered in DMK v. Chief Secretary, Government of Tamil Nadu, where the Supreme Court accepted that a constitutional court retains the power to step in if a delimitation exercise is shown to be mala fide or if intervention is needed to allow an election to proceed at all, even though it will ordinarily decline to disturb delimitation once notified.
The clearest modern statement came in Kishorchandra Chhanganlal Rathod v. Union of India, decided in July 2024. The appellant had challenged the reservation of the Bardoli Assembly constituency in Gujarat for Scheduled Castes; the Gujarat High Court had dismissed his petition by reading Article 329(a) as a complete bar. The Supreme Court set aside that part of the High Court’s reasoning. It held that Article 329(a) bars a challenge to delimitation as a matter of routine, but does not immunise an order that is manifestly arbitrary or irreconcilable with constitutional values; in such a case, a constitutional court can grant an appropriate remedy.
Two more threads run through this line of cases and deserve mention. First, the courts have consistently distinguished between refusing to decide a delimitation dispute on the merits and refusing to look at it at all; even the earliest cases left room for interference where an election could not otherwise go forward. Second, none of these judgments touch the wisdom of a particular seat-allocation formula. The courts have policed the manner of decision-making, not the substance of how many seats a State should receive. That line matters for the post-2026 debate: a future court asked to examine a delimitation order under a new formula is far more likely to ask whether the process was fair and rational than to substitute its own view of the right formula for Parliament’s.
Read together, these three cases mark a gradual shift. Meghraj Kothari protected the election calendar from endless litigation. DMK v. Tamil Nadu carved out mala fide action as an exception. Kishor Chandra Chhanganlal Rathod widened that exception to cover arbitrariness generally, without disturbing the general rule. If the post-2026 delimitation exercise proceeds on a formula that visibly penalises States for their demographic performance, this line of cases signals that the exercise will not be beyond the reach of the courts merely because Article 329(a) exists on paper.
CONCLUSION
Delimitation sits at the point where two constitutional commitments meet and occasionally collide. One is the promise that every citizen’s vote should carry roughly equal weight, which points toward reallocating seats according to current population. The other is the promise, implicit in India’s federal design, that a State’s voice in the Union should not shrink because it succeeded at a national policy goal. The freeze on seat allocation was Parliament’s own admission, made twice, that a purely mechanical population count could not be allowed to run its course without political and constitutional adjustment.
The defeat of the Constitution (One Hundred and Thirty-First Amendment) Bill, 2026, did not answer the underlying question; it only postponed the vote on it. Once Census figures for the ongoing enumeration are published, Parliament will have to choose among competing paths: freezing the current seat shares while expanding the Lok Sabha, applying a degressive formula that cushions slower-growing States, or accepting a straightforward population count and the redistribution of political power that follows from it.
None of these paths is free of cost. Freezing existing shares while adding seats preserves the current balance but does little to correct the malapportionment that has grown since 1971, since a voter in a fast-growing State would still be represented by the same MP as several times as many neighbours. A degressive formula is a reasonable middle path on paper, but building one that survives political scrutiny from every State will take more than one round of negotiation. A pure population count is the most defensible in principle, yet it is also the one most likely to be read, rightly or wrongly, as punishing the States that took national policy seriously. Parliament will have to own whichever trade-off it picks, rather than let a formula quietly make the choice for it.
Whatever path is chosen, the case law reviewed above suggests that the choice will not be entirely insulated from judicial scrutiny. Kishorchandra Chhanganlal Rathod leaves room for a court to intervene if a future delimitation order is shown to be arbitrary in a constitutional sense. The debate over delimitation is, at its core, a debate about what kind of federation India intends to remain, and that is a question the Constitution places on Parliament and the electorate first, and on the courts only as a last resort.
FAQ
Q. What is delimitation, and why is 2026 an important year for it?
Delimitation is the process of fixing the number of seats allotted to each State and drawing constituency boundaries so that seats represent roughly equal populations. Under the Eighty-Fourth Amendment, India’s parliamentary seat allocation has been frozen at 1971 Census levels, and that freeze is tied to the first Census taken after 2026.
Q. Why do southern States object to a population-based formula?
States such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala reduced their population growth decades ago, partly through early investment in education and health. A formula based purely on current population would reduce their seat share relative to States that grew faster, which they see as a penalty for meeting a national policy goal.
Q. Can courts review a delimitation order at all, given Article 329(a)?
Article 329(a) generally bars courts from questioning delimitation laws or orders. The Supreme Court has held, most clearly in Kishorchandra Chhanganlal Rathod v. Union of India (2024), that this bar does not cover an order that is manifestly arbitrary or irreconcilable with constitutional values.
Q. What happened to the Constitution (One Hundred and Thirty-First Amendment) Bill, 2026?
It was introduced in April 2026 to raise the Lok Sabha’s maximum strength to 850 seats and to enable fresh delimitation. It fell fifty-four votes short of the two-thirds majority required for a constitutional amendment and was withdrawn, along with the connected Delimitation Bill, 2026.
Q. Is there a compromise formula on the table?
Several have been proposed, including keeping the present 543-seat allocation across States unchanged while distributing any additional seats created by an expanded Lok Sabha according to demographic performance, and adopting degressive proportionality so that smaller or slower-growing States are not penalised in direct proportion to their population share.
