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19-04-2026
Bureau Report
NEW DELHI: An Indian government bill to expand assemblies that would have brought forward plans to reserve a third of the seats for women did not get enough votes to get through parliament on Friday, in a rare defeat for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Opposition groups said while they were in favor of quotas for women legislators, the linking of the plan to a mass redrawing of constituency boundaries was a government bid to manipulate the system and get more votes.
“The amendment bill has fallen. They used an unconstitutional trick in the name of women to break the Constitution,” opposition leader Rahul Gandhi said in a post on social media, minutes after the bill failed to get through.
The government dismissed that accusation and said it would continue to campaign for women’s quotas. “The women of this country will not forgive you,” Interior Minister Amit Shah said in parliament, before the bill was put to a vote.
The government had argued the constituency changes were needed to reflect shifts in the population since seats were last fixed after a 1971 census.
The bill would have increased the number of lawmakers in the lower house by around 55% to 850 by the next parliamentary elections, due in 2029 with a similar expansion of regional assemblies.
On Friday in parliament’s lower house, 298 lawmakers voted in favor and 230 against, far from the two-thirds majority needed for a bill that would have changed the constitution.
A one-third reservation for women had been agreed in legislation passed in 2023, but was then linked to the next census, which is still underway and would have taken the changes beyond the 2029 election.
India’s parliament does not currently reserve any seats for women, who constitute only 14% of the lawmakers in the lower house and 17% in the upper house.
About 10% of the lawmakers in the country’s state legislatures are women.
The Constitution provides that seats in Lok Sabha must be allocated to states in proportion to their population. Further, constituencies within each state should have roughly the same population. It requires that constituencies should be redrawn (also called delimited) after each census. Similar provisions apply to the State Assemblies. Through the 42nd Constitutional Amendment in 1976, the total number of seats of each state in Lok Sabha and the total number of seats in State Assemblies was frozen based on the 1971 census. This freeze was initially applicable until the publication of the first census after 2000. The 84th Constitutional Amendment in 2001 extended this freeze until the publication of the first census after 2026. This was done as a motivational measure to enable the state governments to pursue agenda for population stabilization.
The 106th Constitutional Amendment in 2023 introduced reservation of one-third of seats for women in Lok Sabha and State Assemblies. This reservation will be based on the first census after the commencement of the 2023 Act. The reference date for the ongoing census is March 1, 2027. Considering that the next Lok Sabha elections will be held in 2029, it is unlikely that delimitation exercise based on the 2027 census will be completed before the 2029 elections. This would imply that reservation for women will not apply to the 2029 Lok Sabha election. The last Delimitation Commission was constituted in 2002, and its orders were finalized in 2008.
Three Bills have been introduced in Lok Sabha on April 16, 2026: (i) the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026, (ii) the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026, and (iii) the Delimitation Bill, 2026.
