106th Constitutional Amendment Act (Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam), 2023

The 106th Constitutional Amendment Act, 2023, formally titled the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, originated as the Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-Eighth Amendment) Bill, 2023, introduced in the Lok Sabha by Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal on 19 September 2023 during the special session held in the new Parliament building. It traces a legislative lineage stretching back to the Constitution (Eighty-First Amendment) Bill, 1996, and successive attempts in 1998, 1999, and most notably the bill passed by the Rajya Sabha in March 2010 that subsequently lapsed in the Lok Sabha. The 2023 enactment amends Articles 239AA, 330, and 332 and inserts new Articles 330A, 332A, and 334A. It received presidential assent from Droupadi Murmu on 28 September 2023, becoming the 106th amendment to the Constitution of India. Its express purpose is to address the structural under-representation of women in legislative bodies, where women constituted roughly 15 percent of the 17th Lok Sabha.

The substantive mechanics establish a one-third reservation of seats for women. New Article 330A reserves one-third of all seats in the Lok Sabha for women, including one-third of the seats reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes under Article 330. Article 332A applies the identical formula to every State Legislative Assembly, again nesting the women's reservation within the existing SC and ST quotas. The amendment to Article 239AA extends the same one-third reservation to the Legislative Assembly of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. Critically, Article 334A governs the commencement: the reservation takes effect only after the first delimitation exercise undertaken following the publication of the relevant census conducted after the commencement of the Act. This deferred-commencement clause is the most consequential procedural feature of the entire statute.

A further mechanical element is the rotation of reserved constituencies. Article 334A(2) provides that the seats reserved for women shall be rotated after each delimitation, in the manner Parliament determines by law. The reservation itself is time-bound: it is to operate for an initial period of fifteen years from commencement, with the proviso that Parliament may extend it by subsequent law, mirroring the renewable structure used for SC and ST reservations under Article 334. The amendment did not include reservation within the Rajya Sabha or State Legislative Councils, confining itself to directly elected lower houses and the Delhi Assembly. Notably absent is any sub-quota for Other Backward Classes women, an omission that became a principal axis of parliamentary debate.

The contemporary trajectory remains incomplete. The Lok Sabha passed the bill on 20 September 2023 by 454 votes to 2, and the Rajya Sabha approved it unanimously on 21 September 2023 with 215 votes. Because Articles 330, 332, and 239AA touch the representation of states, the measure required ratification dynamics consistent with Article 368, though the women's reservation provisions were treated as not requiring state ratification in the manner of seat-allocation changes. As of the 2024 general election to the 18th Lok Sabha, the reservation had not taken effect: the decennial Census of India, originally due in 2021 and repeatedly postponed, had not been completed, and the consequent delimitation exercise—the first since the 2002 delimitation froze constituency numbers until after the first post-2026 census under the 84th Amendment—remained pending.

The Act must be distinguished from adjacent constitutional instruments. It differs from the 73rd and 74th Amendments (1992–93), which reserve not less than one-third of seats for women in Panchayati Raj institutions and urban local bodies under Articles 243D and 243T; those provisions operate at the grassroots and took immediate effect, whereas the 106th operates at the parliamentary and assembly tier with deferred commencement. It is also distinct from the SC/ST reservation regime under Articles 330 and 332, into which the women's quota is interwoven rather than added separately. Unlike a vertical reservation that expands the legislature, this is a horizontal allocation within the existing seat structure, comparable in design logic to the horizontal reservations for women in public employment but applied to elective office.

The principal controversies concern commencement and inclusion. Opposition members, including the Indian National Congress and several regional parties, argued that tying the reservation to a future census and delimitation rendered it aspirational rather than operative, with implementation realistically deferred to 2029 or beyond. The exclusion of an OBC sub-quota drew sharp criticism from parties such as the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Samajwadi Party, which contended that without it the benefit would accrue disproportionately to upper-caste and economically advantaged women. The rotation-of-constituencies mechanism has generated concern among sitting legislators that it disincentivises sustained constituency cultivation. The delimitation linkage also intersects with the politically charged north–south debate over reapportionment, since population-based redistribution after 2026 could alter the relative weight of southern states.

For the working practitioner, the 106th Amendment is a study in the gap between enactment and effect, and a recurring subject in UPSC General Studies Paper II on the polity, governance, and women's empowerment. Desk officers and analysts tracking Indian electoral reform must monitor two contingent triggers—the next census and the subsequent delimitation—because neither the date of operation nor the eventual constituency map is fixed by the statute itself. Researchers comparing global gender quotas will note India's adoption of a reserved-seat model rather than a candidate-quota or voluntary party-list approach. The Act represents the most significant structural intervention in Indian legislative composition since independence, and its ultimate impact will be determined not by its 2023 passage but by the administrative and political decisions that govern its delayed commencement.