India’s Women’s Reservation Attempt: If Panchayats Could Do It, Why Can’t Parliament?  

In the unusual urgency to expand the Lok Sabha from 543 to 850 seats as a prerequisite for implementing 33% women's reservation, India appears to have forgotten its own remarkable success stories in achieving exactly this goal, at other levels of government, without adding a single seat.

India has proven models for gender representation. Why ignore them?

As the Indian Parliament defeated the women’s reservation bill against the backdrop of the delimitation bills, a curious amnesia seems to have gripped the political establishment. In the unusual urgency to expand the Lok Sabha from 543 to 850 seats as a prerequisite for implementing 33% women’s reservation, India appears to have forgotten its own remarkable success stories in achieving exactly this goal, at other levels of government, without adding a single seat.

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India’s Proven Models: Panchayati Raj and SC/ST Reservations

Since 1992, following the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments, India has reserved 33% of seats for women in Panchayati Raj Institutions and urban local bodies. The results speak for themselves: over one million women have been elected to local governance positions across the country. States like Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha went even further, implementing 50% reservation for women at the panchayat level, all within existing structures, without expanding the total number of seats. The mechanism was straightforward: to reserve specific seats for women through rotation at each election cycle. Here, no census was deemed essential, nor was any delimitation exercise required. The constitutional amendment mandated the reservation, and states implemented it within their existing frameworks.

This wasn’t a radical experiment. India had already perfected the template through 75 years of Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) reservations in Parliament. Currently, 84 Lok Sabha seats are reserved for SCs and 47 for STs, constituting nearly 24% of the House. These reservations have functioned seamlessly within the 543-seat structure since 1950, with seats rotating through delimitation exercises without ever requiring an expansion of Parliament’s size. The question then becomes apparent: if India could reserve seats for SCs, STs, and women at the panchayat level within existing structures, why does gender reservation in Parliament suddenly require expanding Parliament itself?

The Story of Women in Indian Parliaments

India’s women’s representation in parliament is a sobering story. From the first Lok Sabha in 1952, with 5% women MPs, to 13% in 2024, the trend is clear. India may take at least 50 years to achieve 25% women’s representation in parliament. In the current Lok Sabha, the opposition parties have a higher share of women MPs: TMC at 38%, followed by Congress at 15%, compared to the ruling BJP at13%.

Men Reserving Their Seats

The outcry over seat expansion also reveals how men’s interests are being protected, both in design and in practice. Citing prevailing patriarchal norms, women MPs, including Priyanka Gandhi, have described the move as a ‘Men’s Reservation Bill’, as the proposed expansion to 850 seats effectively allows the existing 543 seats to remain with men. The implication is clear: those in power are, by and large, unwilling to accommodate gendered representation at their own cost.

The Politics of Urgency

The political contradictions are glaring. When the Women’s Reservation Bill passed in September 2023 with near-unanimous support (454-2 in Lok Sabha, 214-0 in Rajya Sabha), the NDA government insisted implementation was legally impossible without first conducting a census and delimitation exerciseprocesses that would take years. Home Minister Amit Shah and other NDA leaders argued that determining which seats to reserve for women required fresh demographic data. The implication was clear: women’s reservation couldn’t be implemented before the 2029 election, perhaps even later.

Fast forward to April 2026. The NDA government has suddenly discovered urgency, introducing three bills with just two days’ notice and proposing to use the 2011 census—the same data deemed ‘outdated’ in 2023-to implement women’s reservation by 2029, tying it unnecessarily to the delimitation exercise.

Many politicians, especially from opposition parties, have sharply called out this contradiction. Why is a new census needed for a reform long overdue for women? A simple amendment to Article 334 could resolve this—something all opposition parties are willing to support, if the government is serious. Congress leaders, including Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, have echoed this position since the 2023 debates. Several Congress MPs even moved amendments demanding precisely this, which the government rejected as ‘legally impossible.’ What was impossible then has now suddenly become both possible and urgent. The opposition’s willingness to implement the quota immediately within existing seats demonstrates that political will, and, importantly, stillexists across party lines. Now, the women’s reservation bill is being defeated in parliament, which is more a failure of political calculus.

That NDA governments’ political calculus has longer-term implications, as fiercely debated, especially in South India. The proposed expansion to 850 seats could reshape India’s federal balance. States with higher population growth—indicating the failure of India’s family planning policiesare primarily in northern India, where the NDA has stronger electoral support and will likely gain more seats. On the other hand, southern states, which successfully controlled population growth,may face a decline in their representation. This amounts to a penalty for complying with national policy and succeeding.

South Indian leaders, such as the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, have called the move an ‘imminent threat’ to federalism. This is why the delimitation exercise, not women’s representation, sits at the heart of the current controversy. By tying women’s reservation to seat expansion, the government has effectively made gender representation hostage to a larger political project of redrawing India’s electoral map.

What is the Global Standard?

Internationally, countries that have achieved significant women’s representation have done so within existing parliamentary structures. Rwanda, which leads the world with over 60% women in parliament, implemented its gender quota in 2003 within its existing legislature. Argentina, the first country in this regard, introduced 30% candidate quotas in 1991 within its existing Congress. The Nordic countries, all with over 40% women’s representation, achieved these numbers through quotas and party-level reforms, not parliamentary expansion. The global evidence is clear: gender quotas work within existing structures. Legislative expansion is neither necessary nor standard practice for implementing women’s reservation.

The Way Forward

India’s experience with women’s and SC/ST reservations provides a clear roadmap. The 73rd Amendment didn’t wait for a census or delimitation. The architects of India’s Constitution didn’t delay SC/ST reservations or tie them to any such prerequisites. They recognised that political representation is a matter of rights. If the government’s true priority is women’s representation, the answer is straightforward: decouple women’s reservation from delimitation. Implement the 33% quota within the existing 543 seats through a simple amendment. The delimitation exercise can then proceed on its own merits, through proper federal consultation. This approach would ensure 181 women MPs in Parliament by 2029, using India’s proven model and learning from our own successes. Instead, we’re asked to wait while Parliament expands, all in the name of empowering women, or at the cost of preserving men’s incumbency in Parliament.

The irony is bitter: India pioneered grassroots women’s political representation three decades ago. Today, we are told we cannot apply that same model to our national political governance without first expanding it by 56%. The question is not whether it can be done; we have already done it a million times. The question is: who benefits from the delay?

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Ashraf Pulikkamath¹, Karthick V²

1. Post-Doctoral Visiting Fellow, International Inequalities Institute (III), London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), London, UK. Email: a.pulikkamath@lse.ac.uk
2. Assistant Professor, Centre for Economic Studies and Policy, Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bangalore, India.Email: karthickv@isec.ac.in