Members of Parliament from southern states have argued, with genuine democratic force, that delimitation of Lok Sabha constituencies based on current population data would penalise states. The Union government has responded in kind. Both sides have invoked the sanctity of the one-citizen-one-value principle with conviction. And both sides, in doing so, have revealed the full extent of their selective commitment to it. Neither has acknowledged the three systematic violations of the same principle at the grassroots level.
The first violation: Merging villages without consent
Across India, gram panchayats — constitutionally elected, locally accountable, the institutional embodiment of community self-governance — are being absorbed into urban local bodies. This is happening by executive notification, without public hearing, without gram sabha resolution, and without any independent assessment of whether the merger serves the interests of the affected community.
The legal architecture governing such mergers is conspicuously permissive. State municipal laws vest the power of territorial expansion entirely in the state government. A village that has existed as an autonomous self-governing unit for generations can be dissolved into a city corporation by gazette notification. The gram sabha — the assembly of every adult voter in the village, recognised by the Constitution as democracy’s most direct expression — has no legally enforceable right to be consulted, let alone to consent or refuse.
The consequences are immediate and severe. Property taxes rise sharply. Village common lands, previously under panchayat stewardship, become vulnerable to reclassification and diversion. The responsive, community-rooted governance of a panchayat is replaced by the remote administration of a city corporation where the former village is one ward among hundreds. Most critically, the political value of the village citizen’s vote — already one among millions in state and national elections — is further diminished in an urban body where their specific interests register as statistical noise.
This is the parliamentary delimitation grievance translated to the village level, enacted daily, without the national outrage. The political weight of a community is being redrawn without process, without consent, and in ways that serve administrative convenience and real estate interests rather than democratic principle.
The second violation: Wards drawn by political arithmetic
Within existing urban local bodies, the creation and redrawing of municipal wards — the fundamental unit of urban democratic representation — has become in many states an openly political exercise.
Ward boundaries are drawn and redrawn to serve incumbents, to fragment communities whose solidarity makes them electorally potent, or to manufacture favourable seat distributions before elections. The number of wards is increased or decreased not on the basis of any principled population norm but on the basis of what arithmetic suits the ruling party.
The 74th Constitutional Amendment mandates delimitation of wards on the basis of population but leaves methodology, periodicity, and process entirely to state legislation — which is to say, to the discretion of the governments whose electoral futures are at stake. The result is systematic malapportionment.
In many cities, ward delimitation has not been conducted for decades despite dramatic population shifts, creating stark disparities where a vote in an under-populated ward is worth several times a vote in an over-populated one. In others, wards are redrawn just before elections in ways that would be instantly recognisable as gerrymandering if done at the parliamentary level.
The southern states’ grievance about Lok Sabha delimitation is, at its core, a grievance about malapportionment — that their citizens’ votes will be worth less than the votes of citizens elsewhere.
That grievance is legitimate. But the same malapportionment, the same ward-level gerrymandering has been standard practice in municipal governance for decades. The MPs making the most passionate speeches about the one-citizen-one-value principle represent states where urban wards have not been fairly delimitated in a generation. The principle, it appears, becomes visible only when it affects the powerful.
The third violation: The unelected authority over the village
The most structurally consequential violation is also the least discussed. Across India, state governments have created Urban Development Authorities (UDA) — planning and land-control bodies whose jurisdiction extends deep into rural hinterlands, encompassing hundreds of gram panchayats and millions of rural citizens who have elected no member of these authorities and cannot vote any of them out.
Telangana’s recent constitution of 27 UDAs in a single executive decision is the most concentrated recent example, but the model is national.
The National Capital Region Planning Board governs land use across more than 55,000 sq km, spanning hundreds of panchayats in four states, through a body chaired by a Union Minister and composed of appointed officials.
The Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority, the Bengaluru Metropolitan Region Development Authority, the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority, and their counterparts in Pune, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Kochi, and dozens of other cities have together brought a vast proportion of India’s peri-urban villages under planning regimes to which their elected panchayats are subordinate in all but formal name.
The instrument of control is land. Through master plans, zoning regulations, and development approvals, a UDA determines how village land may be used. This power overrides the land management functions that gram panchayats hold under state panchayati raj acts.
In scheduled tribal areas, the Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act – the PESA Act – provides some protection for gram sabha rights over land. For the overwhelming majority of Indian villages outside these areas, no equivalent protection exists. A UDA’s master plan can zone village common land for industrial use; block the construction of housing for the village’s own growing population; channel the appreciation of land value — generated by infrastructure investment — to developers rather than the community. The elected sarpanch and the gram sabha have no effective veto.
This is a form of democratic displacement more insidious than outright abolition. The panchayat continues to exist. Elections continue to be held. The constitutional machinery is preserved in form while being emptied of substance. The village community continues to vote — but the thing their vote governs has been quietly transferred to an authority they never elected and cannot hold accountable.
One principle, three violations, one pattern
These three violations — forced panchayat mergers, arbitrary ward creation, and UDA supremacy over village land — are not separate administrative failures. They are expressions of a single structural pattern: the consistent prioritisation of state government control and elite development interests over the constitutional principle of democratic self-governance at the grassroots.
The pattern is enabled by a critical gap in the Constitution’s architecture. The 73rd Amendment’s Schedule XI lists the subjects over which panchayats “may” be given powers — it does not create an exclusive constitutional domain that state governments cannot invade.
This permissive language, which was a compromise at the time of the amendment’s passage, has become the legal foundation for three decades of panchayat disempowerment. State governments can create UDAs that supersede panchayat land powers, can merge panchayats into urban bodies, can redraw municipal wards — all without constitutional violation, because the Constitution does not, in sufficiently strong terms, prohibit them from doing so.
The delimitation debate at the parliamentary level is, at root, a debate about whether this kind of power — the power to redraw the frames within which democratic voice operates — can be exercised by the majority without constraint.
These are not demands that can be limited to Parliament. They are demands that must flow through the entire democratic structure — from the Lok Sabha ward to the gram sabha, without interruption.
A democracy that must be made whole
The resolution begins with consistency. Political parties that invoke the one-citizen-one-value principle in parliamentary debates must be held to it in their conduct toward local institutions.
Concretely, this means: mandatory independent delimitation commissions for municipal wards, with timelines that cannot be waived. Legally enforceable gram sabha consultations before any panchayat is merged into an urban body. Panchayat concurrence as a prerequisite for UDA master plans that affect village land. And elected panchayat representation on the governing boards of every UDA that includes village areas in its jurisdiction.
More fundamentally, it requires a constitutional amendment to convert Schedule XI from a permissive list into a genuine guarantee — an exclusive domain of panchayat powers over which no state-created authority can ride without the consent of the affected community. The gram sabha must be restored as a decision-making institution with real legal force over village land, not a consultative formality easily bypassed by state action.
The three tiers of government that India’s Constitution recognises are not three separate democracies. They are one democracy, operating at different scales. The principle that protects a citizen’s vote in a Lok Sabha constituency is the same principle that must protect a villager’s voice in a gram sabha. It cannot be divided. It cannot be applied at the top while being dismantled at the bottom.
India stands at a moment when the principle of equal democratic value has acquired unusual political prominence. That prominence must not be wasted on a debate confined to Parliament’s own interests.
The citizens who will benefit most from the genuine application of one citizen, one vote, one value are not those whose representatives are already in Parliament arguing about delimitation. They are the residents of peri-urban villages being absorbed into cities without consent, the urban ward voters whose boundaries are drawn to neutralise their voice, and the gram sabha members who watch a UDA’s master plan override everything their panchayat was elected to protect.
Democracy does not descend from Parliament to the people. It must ascend from the people to Parliament. And that ascent is only possible when the principle of equal democratic value is planted at the very beginning — in the village, in the ward, at the grassroots — and honoured there with the same commitment that is now being so loudly demanded at the top.
Dr Narasimha Reddy Donthi is a public policy expert based in Hyderabad.
Views expressed are the author’s own.