Months after the Narendra Modi government faced its first failure in parliament to get a constitutional amendment Bill passed when a united opposition defeated its delimitation-Lok Sabha expansion legislation plan, speculation is now rife that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Union government is looking to reintroduce the legislation. While on one hand the BJP is looking to shore up its numbers in the Lok Sabha through a spate of defections, on the other, statements from the saffron party’s key ally, Telugu Desam Party (TDP), that any such new legislation would include a uniform 50% increase in seats across states has only added to the speculation. The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) released a working paper last month in which it recommended a “targeted” criteria for splitting seats in the next delimitation of parliamentary constituencies, that, while respecting largely 50% increase per state, goes beyond population distribution, links it to boosting future voter turnout, particularly among women. Experts said that while a 50% increase across states may face less opposition, it also is only one of the concerns of any delimitation exercise being sought under the BJP as concerns of gerrymandering constituencies remain.According to former IAS officer K. Ashok Vardhan Shetty, a Member of Tamil Nadu’s High-Level Committee on Union-State Relations, the claim of uniform 50% increase in Lok Sabha seats across states comes with an inherent contradiction.“Once the freeze on Lok Sabha seats at 1971 Census levels is lifted by deleting the relevant provisos of Articles 81 and 82, population-based delimitation of Lok Sabha seats based on the relevant Census population figures would automatically kick in,” he said.“This would reward the Hindi heartland States and a few others that lagged behind in implementing India’s population policy, significantly recasting the federal balance. Increasing the Lok Sabha seats uniformly by 50% for all the states would mean that the relative weight – a state’s percentage share of the total strength of the House – would be maintained. In other words, the current relative weight of each State would continue to be applied to the expanded House of 850 seats without disturbing the federal equilibrium.”Shetty said that such a uniform increase on the other hand does not provide any conceivable political gains. “While such a promise was orally made, its absence in the text of the Constitution (131st Amendment Bill) debated in April 2026 rendered it unacceptable. There is no political advantage to be conceivably gained by such a 50% uniform increase for all States unless the intention is to significantly alter the boundaries of all the Lok Sabha constituencies (now reduced in area) using this opportunity,” he said.Also read: BJP’s Rejiggered Strategy on Delimitation and Women’s Reservation Is No Less WorrisomeOn April 17, the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, that sought to increase the strength of the Lok Sabha to 850 seats to “operationalise women’s reservation” failed to receive the required support from a two-thirds majority of members present and voting. The three-package Bill sought to bring in large-scale changes that would not just increase the strength of the Lok Sabha to 850 but also result in a fundamentally altered parliamentary arithmetic and change in Union-state relations.While the government had promised a 50% increase across states, including on the floor of the house when in the final leg of the debate, Union home minister Amit Shah demanded “an hour” to bring an amendment to the bill to put it in writing, it was never made a part of the text of the legislation. Though the BJP’s ally TDP supported the bill in the house, other southern states had raised concerns that the constitutional amendment which was tied to the 2011 census, if passed, would disadvantage the states that had seen their population growth rates decline due to effective family planning measures since 1971, following which a freeze on delimitation was imposed. The Wire has reported earlier that the previous bill also failed to establish how it would maintain an equal population-to-seat ratio across India while simultaneously increasing every state’s seats by an arbitrary flat percentage like 50%.Just last month, Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu said that the absence of the 50% increase was a mere omission from the text and said that the NDA government will bring the Delimitation Bill and introduce women’s reservation soon.“The intention of the government was absolutely clear from the beginning. The government stated it on the floor of the House that there will be 50% increase of seats across the states and the proportion of seats will not change. There was only a matter of omission from the text of the Bill. The opposition unnecessarily made it an issue,” he said.Can the 50% increase address concerns around delimitation?Experts said that the lack of the 50% uniform increase in the text of the bill was not the only concern, even though it can meet less opposition in its implementation.“If the across-the-board 50% increase is codified into law, I expect it will generate much less opposition than the government’s first attempt. The discrepancy between the text of the bill and the government’s promises was a major obstacle to its passage. However, there are other aspects of the government’s initial delimitation package which could raise concerns this time,” said Milan Vaishnav, Director and Senior Fellow, South Asia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.“The earlier bill removed the constitutional requirement that parliamentary and state assembly seats be reapportioned after every census. It also granted Parliament the authority to determine which census should be used for future delimitation exercises. As M.R. Madhavan has pointed out, the expansion in the Lok Sabha would also increase its numerical advantage over the Rajya Sabha if a joint sitting were to be called.”A 50% increase in seats per state, experts argue, may resolve the regional issue, the experience of Assam and Jammu and Kashmir shows that it does not do away with the concern of building in structural elements that would tilt the scale for the BJP. “This solves the spatial or regional issue but does not solve the other concern that opposition parties are worried about, which is that the very act of carrying out delimitation could generate a greater bias for the BJP and its allied parties in a manner that was done in both Jammu and Kashmir and Assam,” said Neelanjan Sircar, Associate Professor in the Division of Social Sciences at Ahmedabad University.The delimitation exercise conducted in Assam in 2023, modified its electoral boundaries in ways that did not even respect geographical boundaries. Even though the total number of seats at 126 was kept the same, the exercise has effectively reduced Muslim representation in the state, and brought down the number of Muslim-dominant seats from about 30 to 23.Also read: Delimitation Could Create Permanent Winners and Losers in RepresentationVaishnav said that while in Assam, “new criteria were used – like population density – and administrative districts were merged (and later un-merged) in ways that have led to concerns about gerrymandering”, drawing boundaries should be kept simple.“My own preference is to keep the process for drawing boundaries as simple as possible. Drawing constituencies so that they are equitable in population, follow major terrain/geographic features, and align well with administrative boundaries would be my preference,” he said.In Jammu and Kashmir, the delimitation exercise conducted in 2022, increased Jammu’s legislative strength from 37 to 43 seats, which is the BJP’s traditional base. The delimitation exercise as in Assam, also betrayed the crucial parameter of geography and connectivity for instance by creating a trans Pir Panjal Lok Sabha constituency by merging assembly segments of Anantnag district in Kashmir with those of Poonch and Rajouri district, effectively diminishing the representation of Kashmir Valley in the parliament.“A fair delimitation is, contiguous boundaries, which are not manipulated in any way, in which the number of people in each constituency is the same, and no other variable- demography, language, gender-is used, which can be addressed within these constituencies,” said Sircar.“But the moment other variables are created as the basis for drawing boundaries, the concern of gerrymandering is introduced, of creating biases that disproportionately benefit one party or the other in terms of how the delimitation is done.”EAC-PM paper suggests ‘targeted’ splittingIt is here that the EAC-PM’s working paper on delimitation that was made public last month, draws focus. The paper proposes a delimitation model which uses “targeted” splitting of constituencies to expand the Lok Sabha by 51.7% to 824 to boost voter turnout, particularly women voters. The model suggests splitting 170 of the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies – these 543 seats would be raised to 824 seats. The splits of the 170 seats will include 59 two-way splits and 111 three-way splits. The paper uses AI projections to suggest that such a model is predicted to raise national voter turnout by between 0.3 and 2.3 percentage points at the next general election, corresponding to 9 to 23 million additional voters.The paper co- authored by EAC-PM member Shamika Ravi, who is also a member of the union government’s recently constituted demographic changes panel, and Mudit Kapoor says that the next delimitation exercise will be different qualitatively from the 2002 exercise and is the first since 1976 in which the per-state seat count itself can change. It uses Lok Sabha election data from 2009 to 2024 to estimate a “statistical relationship” between voter turnout, constituency size, and five compositional features of the constituency-urban share, SC share, ST share, linguistic polarisation, and linguistic diversity.The paper seeks to boost voter turnout, through a “turnout-maximising delimitation plan that splits the largest and most turnout-responsive constituencies into two or three parts”.The paper calls for closing the gap in women’s turnout in urban areas and calls for a “companion set of women-specific operational measures” including recommending that “next delimitation be co-timed with a fresh booth-rationalisation cycle”.It uses 2011 Census data and says in its caveats that it will be possible to refresh the figures when the 2027 census data is available. It also maintains that it is “not a finalised boundary drawing plan.”Sircar said that it is not clear why such “complex variables are being used to create a basis for delimitation, and why simply the number of people and cleanly gridded constituencies is not enough.”“The concern when you start introducing things like turnout, booth rationalisation, urbanisation, linguistic diversity, etc is that these are subject to different interpretations and therefore there’s a concern that you are creating some capacity to manipulate constituencies as a function of these variants,” he said.Is a larger Lok Sabha justified?Experts also said that while increasing the number of constituencies provides opportunities for manipulation that may leave out minorities, it also reduces the effectiveness of parliament, as more MPs will imply even less time for each to speak in the House. A larger number of seats to contest, also skews the financial burden in favour of the BJP as data shows that in the 2024 for instance, the BJP spent over 45% of total campaign expenditure of 22 parties in both Lok Sabha and state polls.The implication of the April bill, in the end, was to lift the 1971 freeze, even as questions remain whether the rationale behind it has been satisfied as population growth among states has continued to remain differential, and the Hindi belt states growing their populations at a much higher rate than those in the south, which contribute more fiscally to the central pool.Tamil Nadu government’s high-level committee on Union-state relations, headed by former Supreme Court judge Kurian Joseph, submitted the first part of its report to the Tamil Nadu Assembly in February 2026. The report suggested extending the freeze on delimitation of Lok Sabha seats at 1971 Census levels until 2126 or till the total fertility rates (TFRs) of all the states fall within a predefined, narrow band (say ±10%) around the national average-whichever is earlier.“The freeze should not be lifted merely because a calendar date has arrived or extended indefinitely without an objective trigger,” said Shetty.