States that have stabilised their populations over past decades could see their share of representation in Parliament shrinking if proposals in the drafts of a Constitution Amendment Bill and a Delimitation Bill circulated by the Centre become law.
The Budget Session of Parliament is reconvening on Thursday (April 16, 2026) to consider the Constitution (131st) Amendment Bill and the Delimitation Bill, which the government says are aimed at expediting the implementation of 33% reservation for women in the Lok Sabha and the State Assemblies.
Backdoor delimitation
The Opposition Congress said the government was using women’s reservation as a facade to railroad inter-State redistribution of Lok Sabha seats without consultation, and ahead of the 2029 Lok Sabha election. “We will oppose this backdoor delimitation. We are 100% for women’s reservation and demand its immediate implementation within the existing strength of the Lok Sabha and Assemblies,” Congress MP Abhishek Manu Singhvi said. “In the present proposals there is not a whisper of the repeated assurance by the government that the inter-State seat distribution percentages will remain intact.”
The proposals emphatically seek to change the seat distribution — indeed, that is stated in the objects and reasons of the Constitutional Amendment Bill itself. The statement notes that “while the freeze of seats on the basis of population figures of the 1971 Census served an important policy purpose, the country’s demographic profile has since undergone substantial changes, as reflected in the population figures of the latest published census, including significant inter-State and intra-State population shifts.”
