Ravi Mishra on India's 2026 Delimitation Crisis

The Hindu

4 hours ago

Published : Jun 28, 2025 15:00 IST - 7 MINS READ
High-voltage political conflicts have become the gladiator sport of our times. More often than not, the underlying issues are entirely frivolous or made-up. On rare occasions, they are non-trivial. The upcoming exercise of delimitation of constituencies for the Lok Sabha and State Legislative Assemblies (based on the first Census after 2026) is one such true conundrum that defies easy solutions.
It also has two sides directly in conflict with each other with much to gain and lose; it is that rare issue that is real, complex, and extremely volatile which results in a ratings bonanza. As a consequence, we have not only had the predictable shouting matches and political campaigns, there have also been several scholars grappling with the underlying issue of late. Indeed, it raises serious questions of fairness regarding the raison d'être of the Indian Union.
Most scholars who have explored the issue thus far have been political scientists or psephologists or others with a background in quantitative methods. A few lawyers have examined this issue as well. Scholars so far have looked at the problem as is, and have looked at its fairness versus unfairness implications—that is, the population of North India has grown exponentially faster than South India since the freezing of the delimitation exercise in 1976. The entire reason for the freeze was to ensure that this population divergence did not become a perverse incentive against the policy initiative on population control. Except, that is exactly what has happened and we are now in a pickle.
Also Read | Delimitation: Facts, fears, and the future
We have two bad options. The first is that we can punish success and reward failure by changing the current representation as the Constitution mandates it. This would rob southern India of its current representation edge, which it achieved through stabilising its population, and equalise that representation with North India which has not stabilised its population. The second is that we condemn much of North India to suffer the consequences of decades of bad governance of the past into the future as well, by retaining the current ratios of representation.
In his latest book, Demography Representation Delimitation: The North-South Divide in India, Ravi K. Mishra attempts to bring in a historian's approach to the problem. His hypothesis is interesting. He argues that the starting point of using the 1971 Census data is incorrect and arbitrary. He argues that the populations of southern India grew much faster in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, whereas the Indo-Gangetic plains did not grow as fast; he therefore suggests the late 20th century and early 21st century is when North India gets to grow fast again when the south does not. And therefore, his reasoning is that we should not punish north India for this cyclical nature of population growth.
Demography Representation Delimitation: The North-South Divide in India
Ravi K. Mishra Westland Non-Fiction Pages: 558 Price: Rs.999
The problem with Mishra's argument, however, is that he does not prove this cyclical nature of population growth with any certainty even though he spends two-thirds of the book on exactly that. It is here that one realises that using quantitative methods to drive a point forward is a skill. Mishra, who trained as a historian, seems to go in circles and does not quite land the argument.
Mishra's analysis of population, population density, their movement thereof from decade to decade since 1871 is an exercise that adds little value. He starts by hand-wavy apportioning of certain populations to parts that now are in Bangladesh or Pakistan. This lack of rigour in handling data irks the reader trained in quantitative methods. Some important States, like Tamil Nadu, throw up data that run entirely counter to his argument. Tamil Nadu is also the State that has been the most vocal about delimitation in 2025. Yet, Mishra seems to completely ignore the implication of that. He uses regression analysis where a simple bar chart would have worked; and uses decade-by-decade explanatory analysis where a regression analysis would have added more value.
So far, these are errors of omission. One can probably excuse Mishra because historians are not trained in regression analysis or in random processes. But what is inexcusable is how the analysis on fertility rate, the reason for population growth and its divergence, is entirely missing. That, even a sympathetic reader would think, is an error in bad faith. The population of a given place in the modern world, where death rates have stabilised and we no longer have famines, wars and plague, is driven by fertility rates. That is, how many children does each woman give birth to. And more importantly, this metric of total fertility rate (TFR) is perfectly correlated with the number of years of formal education that girl children get. And that is a metric of governance.
For instance, if it is true that there is a cyclical nature to this population growth, why should we stop with one cycle going backward? Is it not likely that there were more? And if that is the case, what stops these cycles from being an infinite regress? If they indeed are, it only points to these societies—northern and southern India respectively—having rates of growth that are unlikely to converge for good in the future either. Which then means these societies are fundamentally distinct and therefore cannot be in a single political union where 'one person, one vote' is a foundational principle. The onus of proving this cycle is a 'once-in-the-history-of-mankind' event rests with Mishra. He gives no such proof.
'What do we do when we have two sets of societies in a single Union, each with a massively divergent TFR and different development trajectories? Especially when that TFR is driven by differences in access to school education for girls, which was a policy choice of these very societies. '
Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, and Telangana have achieved low TFR like every other society in the rest of the world has: by sending girls to school. This is true for societies as vastly different as Iran and Sri Lanka. What Mishra should have done is, taken the TFR of these States from 1947 through the current period and plotted them against the number of years of schooling that girl children got in each of them. That would have told him the truth: it does not matter what the base population is or what the population density was; what matters is whether the given State sent its girl children to school. That is why Tamil Nadu's TFR crashed in the decade after M.G. Ramachandran relaunched the mid-day meal scheme in 1982. That policy resulted in gender parity in terms of Gross Enrollment Ratio in schools which had the unintended consequence of a falling TFR.
Also Read | Delimitation debate: Why southern States fear losing political voice after 2026
When it comes to looking at representation and delimitation, the question is not whether the representation index of people in North India is worse than those of South India. Or whether it has been worsening in the last 50 years when the delimitation exercise has been frozen. Mishra answers these questions after an analysis; but that is tautological. Of course it has been worsening. That is how arithmetic works. If we have the numerator as a constant and have the denominator increasing faster for one group as compared to the other, the group with the larger denominator is going to have a smaller index. The real question is: what do we do when we have two sets of societies in a single Union, each with a massively divergent TFR and different development trajectories? Especially when that TFR is driven by differences in access to school education for girls, which was a policy choice of these very societies. Mishra finishes the book without ever considering the question.
One unintended consequence of Mishra's analysis is that he strengthens the idea of these various societies that constitute the Indian Union as being distinct and different in terms of their history and culture. And therefore their population growth trajectories are different. Their politics and policy choices, which affected the population growth, are also different. If we want to force them into a single political Union, we are going to have problems. We can either be fair to some and unfair to others or be unfair to everyone. If fairness to everyone is a yardstick, we have no option but to radically decentralise the Union.
Nilakantan R.S. is a data scientist and the author of South vs North: India's Great Divide.