The announcement of Census 2027 has sparked off a fresh debate on delimitation. The argument that it will penalise states that have controlled their population better is based on popularly held myths.

Research this writer undertook on Census data since 1872 shows that all regions of India grew briskly in terms of population at different points of time, with the South growing faster till 1951, and North India picking up pace after that. Kerala was the first state to double its population between 1881 and 1931, and Tamil Nadu was the next. Kerala doubled its population yet again between 1931 and 1971, and then began to stabilise its population. While this may sound surprising to many, it’s true, and follows the pattern demographic transition has taken the world over.

Out of the four regions of India, the North grew at the lowest rate between 1881 and 1951. Its demographic take-off decade was the 1950s, precisely the period when ‘population explosion’ emerged as a serious global policy concern. The later demographic growth phase of the North was thus mistakenly seen as caused by social and cultural backwardness, and failure of family planning, without considering longer-term empirical evidence.

In 1976, delimitation was frozen for 25 years on the basis of the 1971 Census, and the same was done in 2001 for another 25 years. So, the constitutional principle of ‘one person, one vote, one value’ no longer holds, and the value of a vote in Bihar is much lower than the value of a vote in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Policymakers will have to figure out how to reconcile the constitutional promise with this skew which will have only increased since 2001. Importantly, while the right to equality is one of the bedrocks of the Constitution, formal equality is abandoned by it only for the benefit of the more deprived and backward — subsidies to the poor and reservation for backward classes being an example — and never for the well-off. One argument that the debate on delimitation will thus have to confront is whether formal equality can be abandoned in favour of better-off groups, socially or geographically, and what it will mean for the Constitution.
While this is for political players to decide, it is important that the debate takes place on an empirically sound basis. The North, meaning the Hindi belt, has not grown at a disproportionate rate vis-a-vis other regions of India, and its national population share has gone down from about 50% in 2001 to 46% in 2011. South India has grown rapidly for 100 of those 150 years, increasing its share from about 22% in 1881 to about 26% in 1951, maintaining it at around 25% in 1971, before going down in the last few decades.

Over 1881-1971, the North had the lowest cumulative growth of about 115%, as compared to the South at 193%, West 168% and East 213%. Over 1881-2011, the North at 427% was again at the bottom, with the South at 445%, West at 500%, and East at 535%.

The prevalent distorted perception arises from taking only the post-1971 period into account — when population growth in the South started slowing down with better social and economic indicators, even as growth in the less developed North and better-off states of the West picked up.

Without considering principles of demographic transition that operate in most societies over the long term, a proper perspective on why populations of different regions of India — or, of the world for that matter — grow at differential paces during any given period won’t develop. Culture may at best be a marginal influence on population growth patterns, which social and economic factors adequately explain.

Any causal connection between family planning and population control in India is at best tenuous, mainly because when family planning assumed importance in the 1960s, some southern states had already grown at a rapid pace and were at or near their peak population growth rates. Therefore, they witnessed stabilisation from the 1970s and 1980s. Family planning was at best an associate factor. Moreover, relatively developed western India has shown good demographic growth over the last 150 years, increasing its population share and potential parliamentary representation.

Today, North and West India are grossly under-represented, the East is almost even, while the South is heavily over-represented. While the average Lok Sabha constituency in the South has just about 21 lakh people, in the North it has around 31 lakh, and in the West 28 lakh. The real divide in representation isn’t North vs South; it’s more like the South versus the rest.

END OF ARTICLE