2027 delimitation must go beyond North-South talk

When India’s Delimitation Commission next convenes, it will inherit a task that no commission has faced in fifty years: the freedom to actually change how many parliamentary seats each state sends to the Lok Sabha. The 84th Constitutional Amendment of 2001 froze that allocation until after the first census taken after 2026. The 2027 Census will lift that freeze, and the redistribution of roughly 281 new seats across 36 states and Union Territories will follow.

The political debate has focused almost entirely on the North-South dimension, on whether states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which succeeded in controlling population growth, will now be punished for that success by a reallocation that rewards higher-growth Hindi-belt states. That concern is legitimate, and it deserves the attention it has received. But it has obscured an equally consequential question that will determine whether any new boundaries actually improve Indian democracy: which constituencies within states should be split, into how many parts, and on what evidence? An EAC-PM working paper provides the most systematic answer yet attempted.

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Drawing on a panel of 2,171 constituency-elections across four general elections from 2009 to 2024 and linking each constituency to its demographic and linguistic profile, it overturns one of the oldest assumptions in Indian electoral studies. For decades, conventional wisdom held that large constituencies suppress voter turnout. The logic seemed self-evident: queues at metropolitan polling booths can run for hours, per-capita polling-station access in dense urban areas is lower, and the voter in a constituency of two million feels more remote from power than the voter in one of 500,000. Smaller constituencies, on this reading, should vote more. And they do, in the raw data. The smallest decile of constituencies turned out at a remarkable 22.9 percentage points above the largest decile in 2009. But that gap has been halving steadily. By 2024, it had fallen to 12 percentage points.

More importantly, once you account for the demographic and linguistic composition of constituencies, how urban they are, how many residents belong to Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes, how linguistically polarised or diverse the local population is, the size penalty largely disappears and by 2024 reverses. A constituency with two million electors at a typical demographic profile now turns out approximately six percentage points higher than a comparable one with one million electors. The residual “size penalty” in the raw data turns out to be a composition effect.

Smaller constituencies tend to be more r ural, more tribal, and more linguistically polarised, and it is those features, not smallness itself, that drive higher turnout. Five compositional features dominate the picture, and they have been reorganising over the past fifteen years in ways that do not point in the same direction. Scheduled Tribe constituencies have emerged as the highest turnout category in Indian politics. The most ST-heavy decile of constituencies reached 73 per cent turnout in 2024, the highest of any group on any dimension in the research. Scheduled Caste constituencies, which once voted at a premium above the national average, have converged down to roughly the national mean. Urban constituencies, which in 2009 voted marginally above rural ones, now vote below them, a reversal that tracks India’s ongoing but uneven urbanisation.

Linguistic structure, too, matters enormously. Constituencies in which a few large language communities coexist and compete have outpolled low-polarisation constituencies by eleven to thirteen percentage points in every election of the past fifteen years, without exception. Where a few large groups believe the election will turn on their own mobilisation, each member of each group has a strong reason to vote. Constituencies with high overall linguistic diversity, many language communities coexisting, have been catching up as a turnout amplifier since 2014. The sharpest and most consequential finding is about gender. Women’s electoral participation is dramatically more sensitive to constituency composition than men’s. Urban share is the single largest predictor of female turnout, and the urban penalty for women is more than double the urban penalty for men.

Women in fully urban constituencies today turn out approximately five percentage points below rural women at every constituency size. For men, the urban gap is around two percentage points. This asymmetry has a clear structural logic. Dense female-targeted welfare networks, women’s self-help groups, Anganwadi centres, vernacular health and microcredit programmes, are concentrated in rural India and provide a powerful social infrastructure for mobilising female voters. Urban anonymity and higher time costs of voting, particularly for working women with care responsibilities, weaken those networks precisely where constituency sizes and booth loads are highest. The implication is uncomfortable.

The least-participating subgroup in Indian democracy today is not the rural poor. It is the woman in a large, fully urban metropolitan constituency. The most-participating sub group is the woman in a high- Sche dule d-Trib e, r ural constituency. A targeted delimitation plan concentrating three-way splits on large metropolitan and linguistically complex constituencies, and two-way splits on secondary-urban ones, is estimated to raise national voter turnout by between 0.3 and 2.3 percentage points at the next general election. That range reflects genuine statistical uncertainty. It corresponds to between nine and twenty-three million additional voters. Thirty-four of thirty-six states and Union Territories show a positive predicted gain.

The constituencies identified for three-way splits are heterogeneous: they include fully urban metropolitan seats such as Hyderabad, Secunderabad, and Kolkata South, but also rural Scheduled-Tribe constituencies such as Lohardaga in Jharkhand and Kandhamal in Odisha, whose joint demographic and linguistic depth generates steep predicted gains from splitting. There are, however, two things that splitting alone cannot do. It cannot close the female-urban participation gap. The residual five-percentage-point female urban penalty is preserved within every daughter constituency that a split would create, because the daughters inherit the parent constituency’s compositional profile. Closing that gap requires accompanying operational reform: women-only polling booths in urban metropolitan constituencies, extended polling hours that accommodate the time constraints of urban working women, transport linkages from urban-fringe residential areas to polling stations, and women-targeted voter-roll drives using existing civic networks.

It cannot resolve the deeper constitutional question about how states are represented in Parliament. Legal scholars have pointed out that the proposed approach of expanding the Lok Sabha on a pro-rata basis, preserving each state’s current proportional share anchored in the 1971 Census freeze, extends rather than resolves a fifty-year-old political bargain that sits uneasily with the Constitution’s original design. A more durable solution may lie in reforming the Rajya Sabha into a genuine forum for state interests, with meaningful powers over fiscal legislation and a rebalanced seat allocation that gives smaller states a structural voice. As India urbanises rapidly, the share of the electorate in large metropolitan constituencies will continue to rise.

Whether that rising urban share translates into falling national turnout or into a renewed wave of female and urban participation will be decided largely by what the Delimitation Commission chooses to do and what operational reforms accompany it. The 2027 Census offers India its first real chance in five decades to redesign the building blocks of its democracy. The empirical case for doing so wisely, and the constitutional stakes of doing so hastily, have rarely been clearer. The North-South debate is important. But the quality of the constituencies we create, who lives in them, how they are composed, and whether women in cities can actually participate in them, may matter even more.

(The writer is a tech and social entrepreneur and Programme Director (Eastern India) at WHEELS Global Foundation, a Pan-IIT alumni initiative working across 20+ states in India)