Reserved constituencies

Under FPTP, the candidate with the most votes wins, which can disadvantage smaller social groups. Given India's history of caste discrimination, dominant groups might win everywhere while oppressed groups stayed unrepresented. The Constitution's makers looked for a fair remedy.

Separate electorates versus reserved constituencies:

• Under separate electorates, introduced by the British, only voters of a particular community could vote for that community's representative. Many in the Constituent Assembly feared this would divide the nation, and rejected it.
• Under reserved constituencies, all voters in the constituency vote, but candidates must belong to the community for which the seat is reserved. This helps groups that are spread thinly across the country, too few to win in any one constituency but sizeable nationally.

Reservation for SCs and STs. The Constitution reserves seats in the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, in proportion to their share of the population. It was first made for 10 years and has been extended by amendments up to 2030; Parliament may extend it further. Of the 543 elected Lok Sabha seats, 84 are reserved for SCs and 47 for STs (as on 26 January 2019).

Who decides which seats are reserved? An independent Delimitation Commission, appointed by the President and working with the Election Commission, draws constituency boundaries across the country.

• Each state's quota of reserved seats depends on its SC and ST population.
• Constituencies with the highest proportion of ST population are reserved for STs.
• For SCs, the Commission picks constituencies with higher SC populations but also spreads them across the regions of the state.
• Reserved constituencies can rotate at each delimitation.

Women. The Constitution made no similar reservation for other groups, but there was a long-standing demand to reserve one-third of seats for women, given how few were elected. Reservation for women already exists in rural and urban local bodies; for the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies, it has been provided by the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (Women's Reservation Act), 2023.

Example (new): in a reserved constituency, a voter of any caste can vote, and may choose among several candidates from the reserved community belonging to different parties, so representation is guaranteed while the choice stays with all voters.