Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been seeking to redraw parliamentary constituencies in 2026 to reflect population changes, a process known as delimitation. Delimitation would naturally advantage states with larger and growing populations, such as the Hindi-speaking Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in north India and disadvantage southern states, such as Tamil Nadu, which have lower fertility rates.
Unsurprisingly, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin has protested this move, recently calling an all-party meeting to discuss the issue. Other Tamil politicians have suggested that the Modi government “want[s] to penalize us” for controlling the population.
It is true that South India has achieved lower population growth earlier than the North, but the North has also been lowering fertility rates. The northern plains have always supported the bulk of India’s population — 60 percent in historical times — and today, the five South Indian states have around 20 percent of India’s population. In arguing for fairness, is it fair for a state to have a number of seats that are disproportionate to their actual population?
Under the Constitution of India, parliamentary constituencies in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, are supposed to be redrawn every 10 years on the basis of census data. This is to maintain the democratic idea of one person, one vote, and is hardly unique to India: the United States does a similar thing every 10 years, with the number of representatives that each state sends to the House of Representatives changing each time.
In India, an independent body, the Delimitation Commission, is responsible for redrawing parliamentary boundaries, and has done so in 1951, 1961, and 1971, but not since. The process of delimitation was frozen in 1976 so as not to penalize states that implemented successful family planning policies, as these states would be at risk of losing parliamentary seats. The freeze has since been extended to 2026. The southern states now want the freeze to be extended to 2056, to give northern states time to “catch up” with the South’s low fertility rates.
Some southern politicians, such as K.T. Rama Rao, the chairperson of the opposition Bharat Rashtra Samithi in Telangana state, have even argued that states should be represented on the basis of their GDP contribution to India, noting that the south, with 19 percent of the population, contributed to 36 percent of India’s GDP. This idea, however, is problematic even for southern states: it is almost inevitable that the populous northern states will overtake the southern ones in GDP one day on the basis of their larger populations. What will Telangana and Tamil Nadu do then?
There is an unfortunate pattern of India increasingly turning away from its core, democratic constitutional tenant of “one person, one vote.” As it is, reservations and quotas for Scheduled Castes, women, and other groups undermine this principle in favor of satisfying the rights of groups of people over individual citizens. Rigging representation to satisfy the demands of states would be another example of this phenomenon.
That being said, while the concerns of the southern states seem, at first glance, opportunistic and even undemocratic, they do in fact reflect a concern for the relative power of states as opposed to central governments. A purely demographic approach to representation would likely strengthen the central government and weaken federalism because it would allow the central government to be formed by the votes of the largest concentrations of people and enact national policies that would essentially undercut the role of states as intermediate powers between the people they represent and the central government.
India’s issues with representation are nothing new from a historical perspective. Almost every time there has been a representative system of government, debates have erupted on the nature of that representation, sometimes due to vested interests, but more often due to differences in population between regions. In an echo of the issue now troubling India, constituencies in the United Kingdom did not change to reflect population shifts for centuries, so as to better preserve the balance of power that had existed since the Middle Ages. By the 19th century, many of these so-called rotten boroughs had tiny constituencies — in some cases, only three or five people — making them easy for local landowners to control. At the same time, some new industrializing large cities had no representation. The British Parliament passed the Reform Act of 1832 to rectify this. The proposals of southern states in India to freeze delimitation up to 2056, and maybe even beyond, could create a situation akin to that of the rotten boroughs in the U.K.
A more well-known case study regarding representation as it pertains to different regions is that of the U.S. during the writing of its constitution. During the constitutional convention in 1787, James Madison — a future U.S. president — proposed the Virginia plan, which would have given both the upper and lower chambers (now known as the Senate and House of Representatives) proportional representation based on the populations of the states. This was unacceptable to the smaller states, which instead proposed the New Jersey plan, in which each state would have a single representative in a unicameral chamber, not unlike the way the United Nations General Assembly is constituted today. Ultimately, the delegates worked out the Connecticut Compromise, which forms the basis of the present system, in which each state has an equal number of senators and a proportional number of representatives. India took a path similar to that proposed by the Virginia Plan: it has proportional representation in both the upper and lower houses of parliament, the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha.
In a report authored by Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hintson of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the authors propose three potential solutions. The first would be to simply commit to the delimitation process and push through the pain that would ensue.
A second idea, which is now being floated by the Indian government, would be to increase the number of seats in the Lok Sabha so that no state would lose any seats, but states with greater populations would gain seats. Home Minister Amit Shah sought to reassure southern states that no state would lose seats. The Lok Sabha would balloon from the current 543 seats to 848 seats, with Kerala losing no seats but Uttar Pradesh gaining up to 63 seats.
A final idea would involve reforming the Rajya Sabha, including reinstituting a domicile requirement for members of the Rajya Sabha to live in the state they represent. More reform could give each state the same number of representatives in the upper house, just like the U.S. Senate. A report by the Takshashila Institute, a think tank, also proposed, among other ideas, increased devolution and powers for the states, reducing the number of centrally sponsored schemes, and splitting Uttar Pradesh into multiple states.
The type of path India takes would also determine what sort of country it will be: the choices range from an almost unitary-style, centralized state like China or France to a loose federation like Switzerland, to many intermediate positions. The worst thing would be to do nothing and freeze the process of delimitation indefinitely. There is only so long that the can can be kicked down the road without grave injustice. And it is certainly not feasible to delimit on the basis of GDP or some economic or geopolitical basis. But the next worst thing would be to push ahead with a delimitation based on population figures if the result is serious dissension that could threaten India’s unity and federalism.
Therefore, India should implement some sort of compromise that comprehensively deals with the issue of delimitation over the long term. Governance across India would positively improve with more local governance, including more devolution, and more states with fewer people. Not only Uttar Pradesh, but many other states, including Bihar, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu should be broken up into smaller units of perhaps 30 million individuals each for the sake of better governance. This would also decrease disparities among how much representation each state would have.
The Lok Sabha, literally being the house of the people, should retain proportional representation, so as to preserve the idea of one person, one vote, but the size of the house could be expanded, so that each parliamentarian would represent fewer people, enabling a closer connection with the citizenry. On top of this, the Rajya Sabha, which literally means the assembly of the states, could indeed be reconstituted to be similar to the U.S. Senate, with each state having an equal number of seats.
All of this would require a number of reforms that India’s parties would have to closely coordinate on—hardly a given. Yet, if India implements even some of these ideas, it would make the process of delimitation — necessary for a representative democracy — much easier.