Centre Tables 131st Amendment & Delimitation Bills to Expand Lok Sabha to 850 Seats

India last lifted its constitutional freeze on constituency sizes in 2002 (84th Amendment), echoing the U.S. decision in 1911 to cap its House at 435; both moves wrestled with malapportionment caused by uneven population growth. Today’s attempt to add roughly 300 seats revives a debate shelved since 1976, when Emergency-era politics postponed delimitation to protect southern states that adopted family planning. The new proposal signals two long-term currents: a demographic shift empowering the Hindi belt, and the global trend toward legislated gender quotas that began with Argentina’s 1991 quota law and reached India’s local panchayats in 1993. Whether the reform deepens representation or entrenches ruling-party cartography will shape federal balance, fiscal transfers and coalition arithmetic for decades; on a century scale, it may mark the point when India chooses between proportional adaptation and static institutional design in the face of rapid demographic divergence.