Finally the much awaited delimitation bill has been presented in the Parliament.
Since I thought most people are unaware of what it means for the country esp. its urban population, I thought I will explain it. Although India is a democracy where everybody is claimed to be equal. But reality it is not exactly true.
1) The Lok Sabha seat cannot span across state boundaries. Hence smaller states/union territories like:
Mizoram
Nagaland
Sikkim
Andaman and Nicobar Islands
Chandigarh
Dadra and Nagar Haveli
Daman and Diu
Lakshadweep
Pondicherry
Have an advantage of higher representation per citizen. However this bill cannot solve this problem.
2) The real problem we are targeting is that:
The present constituency map for Lok Sabha Seat or a seat in the State legislative assembly was drawn in accordance to the 1971 Census. Over the past 37 years the demography of the country has changed considerably. Several new cities/urban centers have spawned up over the last 3 decades and population of the existing cities (like Bangalore) has boomed to many folds. Hence what was once a open field with little or no habitation is now a crowded apartment complex with over a thousand households. In contrast, thanks to movement of labor to the cities, the village population has been more or less stagnant increasing slightly in areas where new irrigation methods or crops were introduced, and reducing in rain fed areas.
Unfortunately Election Commission could not keep pace with this changing population density and this has yielded some disastrous consequences for the urban citizens. Although cities account for over 70% of the GDP, 80% of all taxes collected and 40% of the country’s population, politicians which continued to ignore the cities continue to get reelected and there is nothing we could have done about it.
With this delimitation, we could hope for a more equitable representation and hence would compel the politicians to respect our urban population.
However one important aspect of the demilitation which involves giving equitable representation to the states whose population density has increased over the past 3 decades, has been left to be outside the scope of the bill.
Ankur Aggarwal
sree
Sandip Chaudhuri
vbr
Skabeesh
shobhendrasrivastava
