Women's Reservation & the Delimitation Question
India's 2023 promise of one-third of the seats in Parliament and the State Assemblies for women is still waiting on arithmetic. The Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, which would have enlarged the Lok Sabha to 850 seats and let the quota start without a fresh census, was defeated in the Lok Sabha on 17 April 2026, 54 votes short of the two-thirds bar. On 8 August 2026 Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said the quota can reach the 2029 election only if delimitation is taken up at the earliest, on census figures already published; waiting for the current count, caste enumeration included, could push it past 2034.
- 131st Amendment Bill
- women's reservation
- Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam
- delimitation
- Article 82
- Lok Sabha
- 106th Amendment
- 2011 census
Read the full living note — free
The complete note in both exam lenses (UPSC analytical / fact capsule), its full version history, and “what changed since you last read” — plus tonight's quiz.
Open in CA·WikiAI-assisted, human-reviewed · sourced from PIB, RBI & ministries · editorial policy
More living notes in Polity & Governance
- Key Appointments - 2026 TrackerAdds three late-August entries. The Union government put three part-time non-official Directors on the RBI Central Board from 24 August 2026 - Annie George Mathew, Syed Akbaruddin and Janmejaya Kumar Sinha - for four years each. On 27 August the President made Chirag Bhanu a Judge of the Himachal Pradesh High Court and Bhupesh Sharma and Yogesh Jaswal its Additional Judges. And on 24 August President Murmu received the credentials of new envoys from six countries, including the UAE, Germany and Sweden. Every earlier row carries over.
- School Education - the RTE Quota, Funds and CurriculumAdds the UDISE+ 2025-26 report card for the whole school system: 24.72 crore students in 14.67 lakh schools with 1.03 crore teachers, at an overall 24:1 pupil-teacher ratio; secondary GER up to 71.7%; Preparatory-stage dropout down to 1.8% and the Secondary stage at 7.0%; single-teacher schools down to 1,00,843 and zero-enrolment schools down 29% to 5,663; girls at 48.4% of enrolment and women at 54.9% of teachers; computers in 69.9% of schools and internet in 67.4%.
- School Education - the RTE Quota, Funds and CurriculumAdds the UDISE+ 2025-26 report card for the whole school system: 24.72 crore students in 14.67 lakh schools with 1.03 crore teachers, at an overall 24:1 pupil-teacher ratio; secondary GER up to 71.7%; Preparatory-stage dropout down to 1.8% and the Secondary stage at 7.0%; single-teacher schools down to 1,00,843 and zero-enrolment schools down 29% to 5,663; girls at 48.4% of enrolment and women at 54.9% of teachers; computers in 69.9% of schools and internet in 67.4%.
- The 2026 Red Fort AddressDecodes the 80th Independence Day address: the Sapt Dhara seven streams, AI training for 1 crore youth, a voluntary civil-defence force, free online exam coaching, the 6-crore Lakhpati Didi goal and the 100 GW nuclear target for 2047.
- The Election Commission Under ScrutinySupreme Court refused to interfere with 2002 as the SIR base year, rejecting a plea for a 1993 baseline in Sikkim; Telangana published its draft roll, with about 92 lakh electors to get notices before the 19 October final list.
- Examination Governance After the NEET 2026 LeakThe overhaul has reached the NTA's own staff: more than 50 employees removed, ten professional leadership posts - CTO, CFO, CISO and test-security and psychometrics chiefs - advertised, and private-sector specialists hired for cybersecurity and question-paper design. Education Minister Pralhad Joshi has ordered a war-footing rebuild of the confidential-operations architecture and a full audit of every exam process. The trigger: on 16 August the NTA set September re-tests for three error-hit UGC-NET June papers - English and Commerce on the 9th, Sociology on the 10th.