DC Edit | Delimitation row: Focus on population goals too

The demand made by an all-party meeting the Tamil Nadu government had called on Wednesday of a status quo on the distribution of Lok Sabha seats to states based on the 1971 census for the next 30 years calls for debating the relationship between delimitation and national goals with respect to population control. It may be remembered that the decision to freeze the calculations for 25 years on the 1971 census was taken in 1976 and extended later in 2001 as a “motivational measure to enable state governments to pursue the agenda for population stabilisation”. It is very natural that there will be an unacceptable anomaly in that ratio when the population figure is frozen on the 1971 data when the states show huge disparities in their rate of population growth. A piece of data will illustrate this better — female literacy in Rajasthan, which has registered a high rate of population growth over the last 50 years, is 52 per cent while in Tamil Nadu it’s 73.