Women’s Reservation Bill: Arguments and counter‑arguments

Lok Sabha’s strength, currently 543, is to be raised to 850, with one‑third (33%) of the seats reserved for women, under the proposed 131st Constitutional Amendment Bill. This bill has now failed due to a lack of the necessary support. For a constitutional amendment to pass, at least two‑thirds of the members present and voting in the House must back it. The government planned to base a fresh delimitation of constituencies on the 2011 census figures. However, the opposition argued that using the 2011 census would significantly increase the number of Lok Sabha seats from the populous states of North India, while southern states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where population‑control efforts have made more progress, would face a proportionate loss of representation.

To avoid this imbalance, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah had promised that Lok Sabha seats could be increased by 50% uniformly across all states. But since this guarantee was not written into the law, the opposition declined to accept it as a verbal assurance, and the bill was ultimately defeated.

The Constitution originally provided that Lok Sabha seats be distributed among states in proportion to population at a time when population growth was not yet seen as a major challenge for the country. From 1976, however, the central government suspended population‑based increases in Lok Sabha seats twice, freezing them for a total of 50 years, precisely because population control had become part of the nation’s development agenda. Today, the argument is that women’s reservation should be implemented without increasing the current strength of Lok Sabha or of the state assemblies, keeping seat numbers as they are now.

The women’s reservation bill was defeated in the Lok Sabha on Friday, 17 April 2026; yet on 16 April, the Union Ministry of Law issued a notification stating that the law would come into force on that date. With that notification, the women’s reservation legislation has, in effect, been validated. Although the Women’s Reservation Act was passed in September 2023, it had not yet come into effect. The gazetted notification has now ensured that the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act remains in force. The law mandates that, after the 2027 census is completed, fresh delimitation will be carried out and women’s reservation will be implemented for the 2029 general elections. With the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act now in force, women’s reservation has become a constitutional obligation.

At present, women’s representation in the country is only 13.63%. The 2019 Lok Sabha saw the highest ever share of women MPs, but still far from parity. Even so, the gradual increase in women’s presence in the Lok Sabha is encouraging. In the present House, the largest number of women MPs come from West Bengal—eleven members. In contrast, Kerala had no woman MP at all. Only after Rahul Gandhi resigned from his Wayanad seat and a by‑poll was held there did Priyanka Gandhi win, giving Kerala a woman MP, even if in name.

If we look at the country’s current MLAs, women’s representation is even lower, at only about 9.5%. The share of women among contesting candidates is also very small. Nevertheless, because some states have been willing to push women’s representation up to 50%, the proportion of women in local self‑governance bodies has increased significantly.

During the Lok Sabha debate on the women’s reservation bill, Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned that if not passed, the women of the country would never forgive the opposition. He argued that when the women’s reservation amendment and delimitation bills are implemented, proportional representation will not change; the country’s women are watching Parliament closely, he said, and opposing the bill amounts to political suicide for the opposition.

The women’s reservation bill has a history of nearly three decades. Over the course of several parliamentary sessions, the bill has been introduced and dropped many times, but has never become a reality. Now that it has again been defeated in the Lok Sabha, there is a possibility that women’s reservation will actually be implemented only in the 2029 general elections.

In a democracy, a leader’s abilities and leadership qualities should be what get them into power. But caste divisions and patriarchal attitudes often stand in the way of women entering the leadership ranks. Women’s reservation is therefore essential to overcome these adverse conditions and to ensure that women’s participation and representation are guaranteed in all spheres. Delaying women’s representation, which is also a requirement of the times, is incompatible with the ideals of equality that a democratic nation holds dear.

(The author is the former president of FOKANA and the founding president of NAMAM (USA).)