Women's Reservation & the Delimitation Question

India's 2023 constitutional promise of one-third of seats for women in Parliament and the Assemblies ran into the arithmetic of delimitation in April 2026, and lost. The Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, which sought to enlarge the Lok Sabha to 850 seats and let the quota begin without waiting for a fresh census, was defeated on the floor of the House on 17 April 2026, falling 54 votes short of the two-thirds bar. Its failure keeps the women's quota tethered to the very census-and-delimitation sequence that has held it up, and exposes a North-South fault line over who gains seats when constituencies are redrawn.