The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) has recommended multi-factor criteria for a “targeted” splitting of seats during India’s next delimitation of parliamentary constituencies in a new working paper that goes beyond population distribution and maintains the current proportion of Lok Sabha seats for all large States.
A model worked out by the EAC-PM on such criteria entails Kerala’s LS seats, for instance, rising from 20 to 30, T.N.’s seats increasing from 39 to 59, and Uttar Pradesh’s seats increasing from 80 to 120 — broadly in line with what the Union government had suggested in April, when it brought the Delimitation-related Bills but failed to pass them in Parliament.
The use of these criteria in the EAC-PM’s model further suggested a doubling of the number of LS seats in smaller States and Union Territories such as Mizoram, Puducherry, Sikkim, Ladakh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Nagaland, Chandigarh, and Lakshadweep.
Out of the existing 543 seats, the EAC-PM’s model suggests splitting a total of 170 seats, of which 59 constituencies have been recommended for a two-way split and 111 for a three-way split.
The model results in increasing the size of the Lok Sabha to 824 seats. As per the Council, this will see the southern States’ (Telangana, A.P., Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu) aggregate share of seats in Lok Sabha come to 23.6% compared to the 23.7% currently. Meanwhile, the share of the six most populous northern States (Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Bihar, and Maharashtra) will come to 45.2% as per the model, compared to the existing share of 45.6%.
The existing proportion of seats-per-State was frozen based on the population figures of the 1971 Census. The freeze was brought in through a Constitutional Amendment in 1976.
While the EAC-PM notes that the next delimitation exercise is consequential because it would be the first time since then to allow altering per-State seat count, it does not comment on the underlying principle for essentially retaining the existing proportion of States’ seats beyond saying that their model has been designed to “respect” the 50% per-State expansion.
The working paper, authored by EAC-PM Member Shamika Ravi and Mudit Kapoor of the Indian Statistical Institute, says that its main objective was to address the following questions: “Which constituencies should be split, into how many parts, and on what criterion”?
In doing so, the EAC-PM said that it assembled a dataset on elections to LS seats from 2009 to 2024 to estimate a “statistical relationship” between voter turnout, constituency size, and five compositional features of the constituency (these include urban share, SC share, ST share, linguistic polarisation, and linguistic diversity).
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The paper added that this estimated statistical relationship was then used to come up with a “turnout-maximising delimitation plan that splits the largest and most turnout-responsive constituencies into two or three parts”.
In the policy brief attached to the working paper, the EAC-PM goes on to recommend a “targeted criterion” for splitting constituencies instead of a “uniform one”, adding that the “Delimitation Commission, when it is constituted after the 2027 Census”, should “treat the joint demographic and linguistic profile of a candidate constituency, and not its size alone, as the criterion for splitting”.
The Council went on to recommend that the Election Commission of India and the Ministry of Statistics should time the next delimitation exercise with a “fresh booth rationalising cycle” and the government should ensure that the “2027 Census tabulations and gender-disaggregated electoral statistics” are released on schedule.
It added that the working paper’s model calculations showed that even after the splitting of constituencies, there remained a residual gap in the women’s turnout percentages in urban areas, and thus recommended the EC to plan delimitation with measures like women-only polling booths, evening polling hours for urban working women, transport linkages to polling stations, and women-targeted voter roll update drives.
In their working paper-policy brief, Ms. Ravi and Mr. Kapoor further break down their study into six key findings. These deal with the relationship of different factors with constituency-wise voter turnouts. In one of its findings, the paper claimed that the model suggested by them is likely to lead to an overall increase of up to 2.3% in the voter turnout across the country in the next general election.
The authors have, however, buttressed this with a caveat, saying that the gain in voter turnout would depend on which statistical specification is chosen, adding that the model was meant to answer what would happen when an electorate is reduced in size while retaining its composition.
The brief also says that between 2009 and 2024, the gap between voter turnouts in the smallest constituency and the largest constituency had halved. “Small constituencies descriptively out-vote large ones in 2024 because they sit on turnout-friendly compositional features (high ST share, low urban share, moderate linguistic polarisation), and not because they are small per se,” it concluded.
Further, what the authors of the paper describe as a constituency’s five “compositional features” and its interactions with constituency size and voter turnout showed that these have reorganised over the time period in ways that do not align with each other. Moreover, the study added that the urban share of voters was the “single largest compositional feature” associated with women’s turnout, adding: “Women in fully-urban constituencies today turn out at approximately 5% lower than rural women at every constituency size, against a gap of approximately 2% for men.”
In other caveats to their study and findings, the EAC-PM added that the demographic and linguistic measures used for the study were based on the 2011 Census and so would need to be updated with 2027 Census figures for a more reliable recalculation.
Published - June 10, 2026 10:01 pm IST
Source: The Hindu - India News
