‘Need a formula for reserving seats, all parties must agree'
The MHA has said that the census will be conducted through digital means, using mobile applications, and self-enumeration. Will it lead to data inaccuracy?
Self-enumeration is a hybrid system in which some individuals self-enumerate while enumerators cover the remainder. That leads to gaps or double counting. Earlier, the enumerators would have a map of the area they cover. They would visit every building and request people's details. Thus, nobody was excluded, and there was no overlap. The self-enumeration option opens up the possibility of double counting. The question is how you avoid that.
The government has shown its eagerness to carry out a delimitation exercise after the census. How soon will it happen?
The whole process is frozen till 2026. The reference date for the census is March 2027, and the government is expected to have the data by 2028. But it is entirely up to the government to carry out delimitation or not. There must be a political consensus, and all states must come on board. States play a key role because everything depends on how the states react.
The southern states fear that delimitation will reduce their representation in Parliament. Are their concerns valid?
Now, there will be even more states who share the same concern. All the states which have seen a sharp reduction in their population growth will complain. When delimitation occurs, the percentage of seats will decrease. The government must take them on board and come up with a formula acceptable to everyone.
You can do delimitation in two ways. One way to say this is that we fix the number of people per parliamentary seat. Determine the number of parliamentary seats based on the population. The second is that they can adjust the number of parliamentary seats and redraw the boundaries so that each constituency has roughly the same number of people.
Can the Women's Reservation Bill be implemented before the 2029 Lok Sabha elections?
It was unanimously passed by Parliament in 2024. The question is which seats will get reserved after delimitation and what are the principles for reservation. You must have a principle behind it, and all parties must agree. I don't think that has been discussed yet.
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The Hindu
4 hours ago
- The Hindu
Ravi Mishra on India's 2026 Delimitation Crisis
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.
The Print
4 hours ago
- The Print
Not just ‘socialist, secular', a lot more from Emergency-era 42nd Amendment still part of Constitution
The 42nd was, by far, and still is, the most comprehensive of all the amendments. It not only amended the Preamble, but also 40 Articles and the Seventh Schedule, and added 14 new Articles. Hence, having altered the face of the Constitution of India, it is often referred to as the 'mini' Constitution. It was the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976 that added the two words, but it did not just change the Preamble. New Delhi: RSS General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale, speaking at an event to mark 50 years of the Emergency Thursday, called for a discussion and review of the words 'socialist' and 'secular', which were included in the Preamble to the Constitution during the Emergency. Among other things, the 1976 amendment made fundamental rights subservient to the Directive Principles of State Policy. It gave the Parliament unbridled powers to amend any part of the Constitution. It restricted the powers of the Supreme Court and high courts to strike down any laws that violated the Constitution. Through these changes, it destabilised the separation of powers, tilting the scales in favour of the ruling central government. Moreover, the 42nd Amendment added to the Constitution the fundamental duties that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party have often emphasised. In 2019, soon after his victory in the Lok Sabha elections, Modi called for a 'paradigm shift' in India from the centrality of 'fundamental rights' to that of 'fundamental duties'. While subsequent amendments and court judgments overturned the amendments introduced by Indira Gandhi, other changes, including the fundamental duties and the changes made to the Preamble, despite periodic opposition, seem to have stood the test of time. No political party has ever formalised a bill to bring changes to these provisions. ThePrint explains the changes inserted by the 42nd Amendment, the changes that remain, and the changes that subsequent amendments or judicial pronouncements removed. Fundamental duties The 42nd Amendment inserted the fundamental duties into the Constitution through Article 51-A. The original 1976 amendment included 10 such duties, calling upon citizens to respect the Constitution, the national flag, and the national anthem; to cherish the noble ideals of the freedom struggle; uphold and protect the sovereignty, unity, and integrity of India; defend the country and render national service when called; promote harmony and common brotherhood among all the people of India; preserve the rich heritage of the composite culture of the nation; protect the natural environment and have compassion for living creatures; develop scientific temper, humanism, and spirit of inquiry and reform; safeguard public property and abjure violence; strive for excellence in all individual and collective activity. Atal Bihari Vajpayee added to these fundamental duties in 2002 through the 86th Amendment to the Constitution, calling upon parents and guardians to 'provide opportunities for the education of his child, or as the case may be, ward between the age of six and fourteen years'. The Swaran Singh Committee recommended that the fundamental duties, in nature, be made obligatory, suggesting a law to provide for the imposition of a penalty or punishment for non-compliance. However, the 10 fundamental duties eventually included in the Constitution were a modified form of the committee recommendations. Also Read: BJP has learned to exploit web of power relations created by India's Constitution Ones that remained The 42nd Amendment introduced changes to the Seventh Schedule, which deals with the division of the crucial lawmaking powers between the Centre and the states. It transferred five subjects—education, forests, weights and measures, protection of wild animals and birds, and administration of justice—from the state list to the concurrent list. A new entry, 20A, was also added to the Concurrent list, adding population control and family planning as a subject. Both Parliament and state governments can enact laws on the subjects listed under the concurrent list. However, according to Article 254, if there is a conflict between laws, the central law overrides the state law. The 42nd Amendment also introduced Articles 323A and 323B to the Constitution, establishing the tribunals. Article 323A pertains to administrative tribunals that look into disputes or complaints concerning recruitment or conditions of service of people appointed to government posts or public services. Article 323B is about the establishment of the other tribunals by the Parliament or the state legislatures on assessment or collection of any tax, labour disputes, land reforms, and elections, among other matters. The Constitution has retained the provisions related to the tribunals. Additionally, the 1976 amendment added Articles 39A (equal justice and free legal aid), 43A (participation of workers in the management of industries), 48A (protection and improvement of the environment and safeguarding of forests and wildlife), and 39(f) (protection of children and youth). All of these provisions have also remained in the Constitution. Besides these, the 42nd Amendment made changes to Articles 81 and 82 of the Constitution, effectively freezing the number and boundaries of parliamentary constituencies– or the delimitation exercise— based on the 1971 Census until the publication of the post-2000 Census. In 2001, the 84th Amendment to the Constitution extended the deadline from 2000 to 2026. Ones that had to go Morarji Desai became the first non-Congress Prime Minister in India after the 1975 Emergency when the Janata Party assumed power. The Indira Gandhi government had to go, and so did many of the amendments it had introduced through the 42nd Amendment. The 42nd Amendment restricted the powers of the high courts, allowing them to consider only the constitutional validity of state laws, and gave exclusive power to the Supreme Court to consider the constitutional validity of central laws. It also added a provision requiring a minimum of seven judges to consider and a two-thirds majority of them to declare a law unconstitutional. The Constitution (Forty-third Amendment) Act 1977, however, removed these restrictions on the judiciary. The 42nd Amendment introduced a provision for Parliament to enact specific laws against anti-national activities and anti-national associations. However, the 43rd Amendment criticised the 'sweeping nature' of the powers and how open they were to 'abuse', leading to the deletion of the provision. The statement of objects and reasons of the 44th Amendment cites one of the primary objectives of the bill as providing safeguards to recent experiences that showed a 'transient majority' was capable of taking away fundamental rights. The 44th Amendment removed 'internal disturbance' as a ground for the proclamation of a national Emergency—the provision India Gandhi used. Instead, it included 'armed rebellion' as a ground for declaring an Emergency. The 42nd Amendment also increased the term of the Lok Sabha and the legislative assemblies from five to six years. However, the 44th Amendment restored their term to five years. Before the 44th amendment, Article 359 allowed the suspension of fundamental rights and their enforcement during an Emergency. However, the 44th Amendment reined in this power, asserting that even during an Emergency, the government could not suspend the rights in Articles 20 (protection in respect of conviction for offences) and 21 (right to life and personal liberty). Additionally, while Article 358 allowed the suspension of Article 19 during any national Emergency, the 44th Amendment inserted a safeguard—the government could suspend the right only when an Emergency was declared on the basis that 'war' or 'external aggression' threatened the security of India. Also Read: Is UCC a state issue or a national one? Uttarakhand vs the Constitution Minerva Mills case The changes made by the 42nd Amendment but not undone by subsequent amendments bore the brunt of a landmark Supreme Court judgment in what was popularly known as the Minerva Mills case. In the early 1970s, the Congress government nationalised Minerva Mills, a textile mill based in Karnataka, claiming that management of the mill affairs was highly detrimental to the public interest. Shareholders and creditors of the mills then approached the Supreme Court, challenging Congress's move. While the issues at the centre of their petitions were the government's nationalisation power and the right to property, it was the legendary jurist and lawyer Nani Palkhivala who decided to use the case to challenge Indira Gandhi's amendments. The key issues involved the amended Article 31C, giving the Directive Principles of State Policy primacy over the Fundamental Rights enshrined under Articles 14 (right to equality) and 19 (protection of certain rights, including freedom of speech and expression) of the Constitution. It meant that any laws made to give effect to any of the Directive Principles of State Policy could not be struck down by a court if they violated the right to equality or the freedom of speech and expression or other rights under Article 19. The 42nd Amendment also tweaked Article 368, which pertains to parliamentary powers to amend the Constitution. It provided the Parliament with unlimited powers to amend the Constitution. Meanwhile, it took away court powers to review the amendments. With the amendment to Article 368, the Congress government attempted to undo the landmark Kesavananda Bharati judgment, which laid down the basic structure doctrine, holding that certain fundamental features of the Constitution cannot be altered by the Parliament through amendments. However, the Supreme Court, through the Minerva Mills verdict, struck down these amendments, which the Indira Gandhi government introduced during the Emergency. The seeds At a time, the government was operationalising the Emergency, the Sardar Swaran Singh Committee constituted in 1976 sowed the seeds for the 42nd Amendment. Appointed by then Congress President D.K. Barooah, Sardar Swaran Singh, the then external affairs minister, headed the 12-member committee. The committee report, while giving a plethora of recommendations, said that while the Constitution functioned without any serious impediment, the interpretation of some of its provisions threw up difficulties—'more particularly when they concern the right of Parliament to be the most authentic and effective instrument to give expression and content to the sovereign will of the people'. However, there were warning signs about the extent of the changes suggested. Renowned lawyer Nani Palkhivala had warned that the committee report 'will in reality change the basic structure of our Constitution'. In an article published in the 4 July 1976 edition of the Illustrated Weekly of India, Palkhivala lamented that 'our monumental apathy and fatalism are such that the proposals are less discussed in public and private than the vagaries of the monsoon or the availability of onions'. On 1 September, 1976, the Indira Gandhi government introduced the amendment bill in the Lok Sabha, incorporating several of the changes suggested by the Swaran Singh Committee. In her speech in the Lok Sabha, the then prime minister asserted that the purpose of the bill was 'to remedy the anomalies that have long been noticed, and to overcome obstacles put up by economic and political vested interests'. The Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha then passed the bill, which received the President's assent on 18 December 1976. (Edited by Madhurita Goswami) Also Read: Tharoor calls Bhagwat's embrace of Constitution 'triumph', Sibal warns against taking it at face value
Hindustan Times
7 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
Digitisation, encouraging first-term MPs to raise issues hallmark of Birla's 6 years as LS Speaker
New Delhi, Digitisation of parliamentary records, special legislative briefings and giving opportunities to first-term lawmakers to raise issues have been the hallmark of Om Birla's tenure as the Lok Sabha Speaker for the sixth straight year. Digitisation, encouraging first-term MPs to raise issues hallmark of Birla's 6 years as LS Speaker Birla, a three-term Lok Sabha member, was re-elected as the Speaker of the 18th Lok Sabha on June 26 last year and completed six years as the presiding officer of the lower house earlier this week. "The first year of the 18th Lok Sabha has marked 104 per cent productivity. The House sitting lasted well past midnight to approve key legislations," the Speaker told reporters in a recent interaction. He said the 18th Lok Sabha passed 24 bills, including the Waqf Bill, the Disaster Management Bill, and the Immigration and Foreigners Bill during the 372 hours of sittings of the lower House through the past one year. Birla was elected as the Lok Sabha Speaker for the first time on June 19, 2019. His second term as the Lok Sabha Speaker began on June 26 last year. Birla said it has been his priority to allow members to raise issues of urgent public importance in the House and a record of sorts was created on April 3 this year when 204 issues were raised in the Lok Sabha the maximum ever in a single day. He said digitisation of Parliamentary records has been another area of priority and the Lok Sabha secretariat was in the process of digitising video recordings of historic parliamentary debates of yesteryears running into more than 8,000 hours. "We have sourced these videos from Doordarshan archives as these date before Sansad TV came into existence," a senior official said. He said an AI-powered search system now allows users to find specific words or topics in videos instantly, even across multiple languages. The official said new technologies have simplified newly elected MPs' daily tasks, replacing the cumbersome process of filling 19 different forms with a unified onboarding app that saves time and reduces errors. The Parliament Digital Library has emerged as a crucial resource, offering the public digital access to vast parliamentary research and information, furthering transparency and democratic engagement. "This initiative not only puts the rich parliamentary knowledge hub in digital space for wider use but also strengthens our democratic legacy," Birla said. He also said AI-driven translation and localisation tools now automatically convert parliamentary documents into the country's constitutional languages. The indigenous AI tool "Sansad Bhashini" provides multilingual support for parliamentary work, breaking language barriers and promoting inclusivity as part of the Digital India mission, the Lok Sabha Speaker said. This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
