Delimitation Is A Costly Affair 

The Delimitation Bill, 2026 was introduced in the Lok Sabha on April 16, 2026, with theatrical confidence—a three-bill package wrapped in the language of reform, representation, and women’s empowerment. Within 24 hours, it was voted down in a rare and historic defeat for the Modi government, the first time a constitutional amendment brought by this dispensation failed in the lower House. The opposition came together with uncommon alacrity, southern states raised their flags, and the political temperature rose to a fever pitch.

But in all this noise—the North-South divide, the demographic arithmetic, the women’s reservation fig leaf, the federal anxieties—one fundamental question was never raised. Not by the opposition. Not by constitutional experts on primetime. Not by the commentariat. Not even in the corridors of Parliament.

Why increase the number of seats at all?

This is not a trivial question. It is, in fact, the only question that matters. And the silence around it is itself a symptom of a democracy that has confused the machinery of representation with representation itself.

The Debate That Wasn’t

The opposition defeated the constitutional amendment on narrow but legitimate grounds. Southern states—Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana—feared that a fresh delimitation based on population would punish them for their success in family planning and development. Having responsibly brought down fertility rates over decades, they now stood to lose political weight relative to the Hindi heartland states that failed to check their population. It was a reasonable grievance, and it rallied the opposition into an unlikely coalition.

The government, in order to dodge the oppositions’ argument came out with ‘guarantee’ that the proposed 50 per cent increase shall be uniformly distributed all across the state. As such, their overall share of Parliament would remain roughly intact. The discourse, predictably, got hijacked into a competition of percentages and proportions. Both sides were arguing about how to distribute the increase. Neither side raised a fundamental question: why the increase at all.

That is the debate this article seeks to start—even if it may be the least comfortable one.

The Sacred Myth of Numbers

There is an unexamined assumption buried deep in Indian democratic culture: that more representatives means more representation. It is an assumption so deeply held that it passes for common sense. The BJP is counting on it. The opposition, by accepting the premise of the increase and contesting only its distribution, has already ceded the moral and intellectual high ground.

But let us pause and interrogate this assumption seriously.

India’s Lok Sabha currently has 543 elected members. The proposed bill sought to raise this to 850—an increase of over 56 per cent. Amit Shah argued for a 50 per cent uniform increase model that would bring the number to 816. New Parliament building, built at a cost of over Rs. 971 crore, was designed to accommodate up to 1,224 members for joint sessions. It reveals that the ambition of inflation was architecturally pre-planned by the BJP.

The question is: what problem does this solve?

If the argument is that each MP represents too many people, let us examine what that claim actually means in practice. A Lok Sabha constituency today has an average population of around 15 lakh people. After the increase, the average would come down to roughly 10 lakh. Is there any evidence—empirical, anecdotal, historical—that an MP representing 10 lakh people is a better representative than one representing 15 lakh? Is there a study showing that the quality of governance, the access of citizens, the accountability of legislators, correlates positively with the number of parliamentarians?

There is none. Because the theory of representation on which this entire exercise rests is, at its core, a fiction.

What Does an MP Actually Do?

This is the question that political science in India carefully avoids, because the honest answer is devastating to the mythology of parliamentary democracy as it is actually practised in this country.

An MP’s primary constitutional role is to legislate—to debate, scrutinise, and pass laws that govern the republic. By this metric, the Indian Parliament has been in near-continuous failure. Sessions have grown shorter. The time spent in actual debate has plummeted. Bills are passed in minutes, without discussion, often amid pandemonium and walkouts. Parliamentary committees, which should be the engines of legislative scrutiny, are systematically ignored or bypassed through ordinances and voice votes.

If 543 MPs cannot ensure meaningful legislative scrutiny today, there is no logical reason to believe that 850 will do any better. The problem is not the number of MPs. The problem is the institutional culture, the whip system, the anti-defection law, and the fact that most MPs vote along party lines regardless of what they personally believe, rendering their individual presence nearly ceremonial.

An MP’s secondary function, in the Indian political imagination, is constituency development —the MPLADS scheme gives each MP Rs. 5 crore annually for local development works.

This is the transactional glue that connects an elected representative to their voters. It is also one of the most corruption-prone and poorly monitored schemes in the government’s portfolio. Adding 300 more MPs would mean adding Rs. 1,500 crore more annually to this scheme, with no guarantee of better outcomes and considerable reason to expect more of the same capture by contractors and political operatives.

What an MP actually does, for the most part, is serve as a political intermediary—a broker between the citizen and the state, a symbol of local power, a patron who distributes favours, facilitates jobs, smoothens official interactions, and maintains a local durbar. This is the feudal inheritance of Indian democracy. It is not representation; it is lordship with an electoral mandate. Adding more such lords does not flatten the feudal structure. It replicates and extends it.

The Staggering Cost of This Exercise in Theatre

Let us now turn to the economics, because this is where the abstraction of political theory meets the brutal reality of public expenditure.

The 2024 Lok Sabha election—with 543 constituencies—cost India approximately Rs. 1,00,000 crore, making it the most expensive election in human history. This translates to roughly Rs. 1,400 spent per voter, or nearly Rs. 220 crore per constituency. Much of this is, of course, informal—unaccounted black money, cash distribution to voters (reportedly Rs.2,000-3,000 per voter in competitive constituencies), party machinery costs, and the lavish personal spending of candidates that never appears in their declared accounts.

The official declared spending by candidates is, by all accounts, a polite fiction. The Election Commission’s own data shows that 543 winning candidates declared an average spend of Rs. 57.23 lakh each. But credible estimates from think tanks and field researchers suggest that the actual cost of mounting a serious campaign for a Lok Sabha seat ranges from Rs. 5 crore to Rs.100 crore, depending on the constituency. The gap between declared and actual spending is itself a monument to the systemic dishonesty at the heart of Indian electoral politics.

Now multiply this by 850 constituencies.

An election with 850 Lok Sabha constituencies, assuming even a conservative proportional scaling, would cost India roughly Rs.1.5 lakh crore. The administrative costs alone—polling booths, EVMs, security deployment, election officials—scale directly with the number of constituencies. EVM procurement alone saw an allocation of nearly Rs.2,503 crore for the 2024 election; with 57 per cent more constituencies, this line item alone would swell by a corresponding margin.

Beyond the election itself, the annual salary and perks of MPs—each receiving over Rs. 1.2 lakh per month in base salary, plus daily allowances, travel benefits, housing, staff, office expenses, and MPLADS funds—would increase proportionally. A Parliament of 850 members costs significantly more to run, house, and service than one of 543. The new Parliament building itself was designed with this arithmetic in mind. This building, built without any political consensus, itself is a standing monument of vitiation of democracy.

The citizens of India are being asked to fund, from their taxes, an expansion of the political class that has, by every objective measure, served them poorly. This is not investment in governance. This is investment in political infrastructure—infrastructure that primarily benefits the parties that win elections, not the people who vote in them.

More Masters, Not More Democracy

The case for increasing the number of seats rests on the idea that smaller constituencies yield better representation. It is appealing, but largely disconnected from how Indian democracy functions. The evidence—from India and elsewhere—shows no clear link between the number of representatives and the quality of governance. What matters are institutions, bureaucratic capacity, judicial effectiveness, and political culture—not numerical expansion.

In practice, the Indian MP is less a representative than a local sovereign. Access is filtered through layers of aides and loyalists, turning public office into a patronage hub. Benefits, clearances, and even routine administration are mediated through personal networks rather than transparent systems. The relationship is inverted: citizens seek favour, not exercise rights. Local officials align with the MP’s preferences, reinforcing the sense that authority flows from individuals rather than law. What persists is a feudal residue within a democratic form.

Over time, the system has expanded without becoming more accountable. Since 1952, parties have multiplied nearly 15-fold, candidates five-fold, and election spending by orders of magnitude. What has not grown is citizen access or legislative quality. What has grown is the wealth and insulation of the political class.

This is reflected in the profile of MPs. Their rising wealth is not a product of salaries but of access—to contracts, influence, and regulatory discretion. Parliament has increasingly become a platform for accumulation rather than public service.

In this context, adding more MPs does not deepen democracy; it enlarges the same structure. It creates more positions for the same patterns of patronage and distance from citizens. The electorate gains not more advocates, but a larger political class.

The problem of representation in India is not that there are too few MPs. It is that those who exist are too unaccountable and too insulated from public consequence. Increasing their number does not alter these incentives; it merely expands their reach.

What Reform Would Actually Look Like

If the genuine concern is that Indian citizens are inadequately represented in their Parliament, the answers do not lie in arithmetic expansion. They lie in structural reform.

To address representation, the mechanisms that effectuate it must be carefully rethought. Foremost, the deeply flawed First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) electoral system—which denies effective representation to a majority of voters and has structurally pushed Indian democracy toward a de facto plutocracy—must be replaced with a system of proportional representation. Many of its concomitant distortions would likely be mitigated in the process. At least the debate needs to be seriously started at the national level. Next, public funding of elections, strict enforcement of spending limits, criminalisation of cash distribution to voters—would transform the social composition of Parliament far more effectively than increasing seats. The current system’s actual barrier to entry is money, not constituency size. A smaller Parliament

that was truly accessible to citizens without crores in campaign funds would be more democratic than a larger one dominated by the same dynastic, criminal, or corporate interests. In the present context, the anti-defection law, which essentially converts MPs into party robots who must vote as the leadership dictates or lose their seats, is the single greatest enemy of meaningful parliamentary representation. Repealing or substantially reforming it would allow MPs to actually represent their constituents’ views rather than their party’s commands. This reform costs nothing and would transform the quality of parliamentary debate overnight.

Meaningful constituency offices with adequate staffing and budget would allow MPs to engage substantively with their voters beyond election season. Currently, much of the MPLADS budget is eaten by intermediaries and the MP’s own patronage networks. Transparent, community-driven allocation of these funds—with genuine audit and accountability — would do more for representation than doubling the number of MPs.

Finally—and most fundamentally—genuine devolution of power to Panchayati Raj institutions and urban local bodies would reduce the pressure on parliamentary representation by moving actual decision-making closer to citizens. The over-centralisation of the Indian state means that too much of what matters to citizens’ daily lives flows through state capitals and New Delhi, making MPs indispensable intermediaries. Break that centralisation and the question of how many MPs there are becomes less existential.

The Question We Must Dare to Ask

India does not need more MPs. India needs better MPs. It does not need more constituencies. It needs better institutions. It does not need a more expensive democracy. It needs a more honest one.

The Delimitation Bill's defeat was a political victory for the opposition and a moment of federal assertion by southern states. It was celebrated, rightfully, as a check on majoritarian overreach. But it was not a moment of democratic reckoning. The fundamental question— should we be expanding Parliament at all?—was not raised, let alone answered.

The opposition that fought the bill did so on the terms the government set. It accepted the premise that more seats are desirable and argued only about their distribution. That acceptance is itself a form of surrender—an endorsement, by silence, of the idea that the solution to India’s democratic deficits is quantitative rather than qualitative.

The citizens of India, who will bear the cost of any such expansion through their taxes, who will continue to be nominally represented and actually ignored, deserve a more honest conversation. They deserve to be told plainly what the evidence shows: that increasing the number of Lok Sabha seats to 850 will increase the cost of Indian elections by at least 50 per cent, will add hundreds of crores to annual parliamentary expenditure, will create more positions for the same class of political operators to occupy, and will deliver no demonstrable improvement in the quality of governance or the accountability of the state to its citizens. In the contradiction between them and the political class, their position is bound to be weaker than before.

They deserve to be asked: Is this what you want?