The Indian Parliament will debate three important bills of legislation that are designed to provide women with a 33% reservation. While the government believes all three of these pieces of legislation are needed in order to provide women with reservations, the opposition has raised concerns about each bill’s political and constitutional impact.
The first bill seeks to amend the Constitution to increase the number of Lok Sabha members from the current 543 to 850, consisting of 815 members from the states and 35 from the Union Territories, with each member being apportioned based upon the population size of the state or union territory.
The second bill seeks to amend the Union Territories Act and related acts for use during the delimitation process. The third bill would create the new Delimitation Act, creating a Delimitation Commission to carry out the delimitation process.
Bill No. 107/2026, which is the Constitutional Amendment to alter the composition of the Lok Sabha (Lower house of Indian parliament) and state assemblies has been the subject of a great deal of controversy because it has so far been frozen through a 1971 census-based allocation formula while unfreezing it raises an issue of population counts and how it would impact the distribution of available seats by state. With this proposal there is no way to identify what population count will be used as a basis for making these future adjustments/allocations between census years 1981, 1991, and 2001.
While the amendment states only applied to post-delimitation period; there are specific concerns regarding the timeline of both exercises (amendment and new census) and if they will accommodate current population trends. Women’s organizations have petitioned to decouple reservation from these two events and make it a constant 33% share regardless of the changes that may occur over time because of either of these events. The proposed Delimitation Exercise has many unanswered logistical and legislative issues with implementation of any quota’s for women that need to be address before any ballots for any quota can be implement within voter registration system, therefore this will add time to implement Women’s Quotas.
