Kala Seetharam Sridhar

A delimitation commission was set up in India shortly after Article 370 was repealed and Jammu and Kashmir's special status revoked in August 2019.

Delimitation is a process by which there are changes effected to boundaries of parliamentary/electoral constituencies, typically a long-drawn exercise, extending up to five years, done usually after the Census since the population is counted at that time. The goal of such an exercise is to ensure approximately equal number of voters in each constituency. Now as we are preparing for the next Census, and the delimitation exercise has led to several protests, it is time to revisit this debate in the context of regional disparities in the country.

Advantage North

Based on the population patterns, the existing distribution of parliamentary constituencies across the States is skewed in favour of populous States such as Uttar Pradesh which has 80 Lok Sabha seats allocated, Bihar which has 40, while southern States such as Tamil Nadu have 39 seats, Andhra Pradesh has 25, and Karnataka has 28. If delimitation occurs, given the population growth has slowed down considerably in the southern States, they stand to lose further in terms of the number of seats, relative to the northern States. So, should it be the number of people alone that should matter for electoral representation or their quality?

We have documented earlier the economic turnaround of the southern States in recent years, post the decade of the 2000s, which has been dramatic. On many parameters such as income and poverty, the northern States were actually better than the southern States at the beginning of 1960s, but the south surged more recently, post the decade of the 1990s.

Southern surge

A recent article pointed out that the combined GDP of just three States — Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu — is greater than 13 States in the East. Many explanations for this paradoxical divide and recent surge of the south, including human capabilities, skills, awareness, have been offered. Here we focus on two aspects of the quality of a State’s population and its human capabilities, skills and awareness: education and health of the population, which are relevant for the delimitation debate.

Education outcomes

The Annual Status of Education Reports have repeatedly brought out that in terms of percentage of children out of school and their cognitive capacities at various grades, the south fares far better than the north, even though the inputs in the form of classroom infrastructure, provision of free textbooks, and uniforms in the northern States were better than that in the southern States.

Further, a higher proportion of graduates in the southern States indicates the greater prevalence of a specific set of skills required for sound decision making. As an instance, in 2011, only 5 per cent of UP’s population was graduate, while in Tamil Nadu, nearly 8 per cent of its population was graduate.

The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated the importance of sound health and its role in decision making. Amid the raging pandemic waves, the south has maintained its lead in testing. While Tamil Nadu has 314 testing centres for a population of 78.8 million as of December 2021, UP has only 305 Covid testing centres for a population of 235 million, which is clearly inadequate.

Undoubtedly the public in the south enjoy better health facilities and presumably better outcomes. Even though it is said that Covid has shaved off some of the life expectancy, the life expectancy at birth was an average of 73.2 years for the south in 2021 (up from only 51.6 years in 1971), compared with only 69 years for the north (increasing from only 47 years in 1971).

Governance factor

If the educational and health outcomes were better in the southern States, this also implies that the ability to discern and the quality of decision making must be significantly better there. The educated citizenry has expectations of better public services in the south where civic activism is also high. This leads us to believe that the electorate in these States would choose better governance regimes when compared with that in the north. Notably, this could not have been anticipated in the 1960s. In this context, it is noteworthy that after the 1970s the average tenure of Chief Ministers in the southern States became quite long, when compared with that in the northern States.

What does the quality of the electorate measured in terms of education, health and better decision making, and higher economic growth imply for delimitation? In the event of delimitation, the contradiction between political power in the northern States and economic power in the southern States is likely to sharpen. At the end, it is possible that the economic power of the south may well offset the political weight of the north. So the question is whether the human skills and capabilities in the southern States should be rewarded by way of better representation to them, such that the rest of the country benefits too from their supposedly better decision making.

If the north economically surges, the delimitation may end up disadvantaging the south. Already tension between the geographies of political and economic power is being felt, through contentious issues such as the Finance Commission awards. Delimitation is an exercise that must be carried out with sensitivity and due concern for a variety of parameters.

The author is professor, Institute for Social and Economic Change. Views expressed are personal