The union government is looking in a hurry to implement the delimitation commission report following by a lengthy meeting of the Group of Ministers held in last week. Earlier, the Supreme Court had stayed the conduct of the delimitation process in four Northeastern states. The apex court had also questioned the delay in implementation of delimitation in 25 other states for which the Commission has already issued notifications.

According to the report, the group of ministers has taken two decisions in the high-level meeting. First, the government should send the consolidated delimitation report, including the reports of including Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Manipur, to the President for the final notification. Second, the 25 notifications have already been placed in Parliament and the MPs needed to be known the result of the delimitation exercise in the constituencies.

The government has asked the Law Ministry to prepare about one thousand of the notifications of each of the delimited 25 states to table in Parliament. The whole process would help the MPs to understand the changes made by the Delimitation Commission. The report says that the Commission has changed the status (reserved, general) as well as size of the electorate in several Lok Sabha constituencies.

Now, the process has reached at almost final stage and the government is ready to recommend a date on which the presidential notification will come into effect across the country. According to Delimitation Commission Chairman Justice Kuldip Singh, the process in the four states had already started it will be completed till the mid-February.

Further, the Election Commission will take some two to three month time to prepare a new electoral rolls of delimited Lok Sabha constituencies. So, we can hope that the Delimitation Commission’s notifications will be implemented in four months from now.

Mr Singh had said earlier that some politicians would be unhappy over the changes in their individual constituencies but most of the political parties would not oppose the exercise. He also indicated that the next general elections could be held on the basis of fresh delimitation but it depended upon the Government.

The Delimitation Commission was constituted in 2001 and it started the process in mid-2004. The Commission has already completed the process in 513 of the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies in and 3,726 Assembly constituencies in 25 states except four states in northeast region.