Raising LS strength to 815 will make it ineffective, says Karti
Congress MP Karti Chidambaram warns that increasing the Lok Sabha to 815 could weaken parliamentary debate and widen regional representation disparities
- Karti Chidambaram said expanding the Lok Sabha to about 815 seats would make the House less effective and harder to debate in.
- Karti Chidambaram said seat redistribution could disadvantage southern states in electoral calculations.
- Karti Chidambaram suggested reserving one-third of existing seats for women.
What happened
Congress MP Karti Chidambaram argued that raising the strength of the Lok Sabha by about 50% to around 815 seats would make the House less effective. He said a larger chamber would reduce each Member of Parliament’s opportunity to speak and would make debate less manageable.
Karti Chidambaram also said that any redistribution or expansion of seats would increase the representation gap between northern and southern states and would reduce the South’s importance in electoral calculations. He suggested reserving one-third of existing seats for women instead of expanding the chamber.
UPSC may frame Lok Sabha expansion around the constitutional basis of the House of the People, the politics of delimitation, and the trade-off between broader representation and effective legislative functioning. The women’s reservation demand can also be linked to the wider debate on descriptive representation in legislatures.
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