106th Constitutional Amendment Act (Women's Reservation)

The 106th Constitutional Amendment Act, formally titled the Constitution (One Hundred and Sixth Amendment) Act, 2023, and introduced in Parliament as the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, reserves one-third of all seats in the Lok Sabha, the legislative assemblies of the states, and the Legislative Assembly of the National Capital Territory of Delhi for women. It originated as a legislative ambition stretching back to the 73rd and 74th Amendments of 1992–93, which reserved one-third of seats in panchayats and municipalities for women but stopped at the local tier. Successive attempts to extend reservation to Parliament and state assemblies—most prominently a bill passed by the Rajya Sabha in 2010—lapsed for want of Lok Sabha approval. The 2023 Act was passed during a special session of Parliament, securing near-unanimous support in both Houses, and received presidential assent on 28 September 2023. It inserts new Articles 330A and 332A into the Constitution and amends Article 239AA, which governs Delhi.

Procedurally, the Act follows the route prescribed by Article 368 for amendments affecting the representation of states, which requires not only a special majority in each House of Parliament—two-thirds of members present and voting, and a majority of the total membership—but also ratification by the legislatures of not less than one-half of the states. The amendment reserves seats within each state and union territory, with the reserved constituencies to be determined by a process of rotation after each delimitation exercise. Critically, the Act conditions its own commencement on two prerequisites: the completion of the first Census conducted after the Act's commencement, and a subsequent delimitation exercise carried out on the basis of that Census's figures. Until both steps are concluded, the reservation does not become operative, meaning the provision is enacted in law but suspended in effect.

The Act builds a layered reservation architecture. Within the one-third quota, seats already reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes under Articles 330 and 332 carry a sub-reservation for women, so that one-third of SC and ST seats are set aside for women belonging to those communities. This is a vertical-within-vertical design rather than a separate horizontal slice. The reservation is fixed for a period of fifteen years from the date of commencement, after which Parliament may extend it by law, mirroring the renewable architecture used for SC and ST reservations under Article 334. The rotation of reserved constituencies, to be undertaken after every delimitation, is intended to prevent any single set of constituencies from being permanently feminised or permanently exempted, though the precise rotation formula is left to subsequent parliamentary determination.

Contemporary debate has centred on timing. Because the last full Census was held in 2011 and the decennial Census due in 2021 was deferred, the triggering Census has not occurred, and the next delimitation is itself constrained by Article 82, under which the freeze on inter-state seat redistribution currently runs until the first Census after 2026. The Union Ministry of Law and Justice and the Ministry of Women and Child Development have both indicated that operationalisation depends on these sequential steps. As a practical matter, the reservation is therefore not expected to apply to the 2024 general election to the Lok Sabha and is widely projected to take effect no earlier than the elections following the delimitation, which many analysts place around 2029.

The 106th Amendment is distinct from the OBC reservation debate and from caste-based quotas generally: it does not, as enacted, carve out a sub-quota for women of Other Backward Classes, an omission that several opposition parties pressed during the 2023 debate. It also differs from the reservation regime of the 73rd and 74th Amendments, which applies at the panchayat and municipal level and is already operational, and from the Rajya Sabha and state legislative councils, which the Act does not cover because those bodies are indirectly elected. Unlike candidate-quota systems used in some jurisdictions—where parties must field a minimum proportion of women—the Indian model reserves seats themselves, removing those constituencies from open contest among all candidates for the relevant cycle.

Controversy has accompanied both the design and the deferral. Critics characterise the dependence on Census and delimitation as a deferral mechanism that postpones substantive effect by years, and have questioned why the reservation could not be implemented on existing constituency boundaries. The absence of an OBC sub-quota and the exclusion of the Rajya Sabha and legislative councils have drawn sustained objection. Delimitation itself is politically charged because population-based reapportionment threatens to shift parliamentary weight toward more populous northern states, entangling women's reservation with a federal redistribution dispute that southern states have resisted. As of the most recent parliamentary record, no implementing Census or delimitation had commenced.

For the working practitioner—the desk officer tracking Indian electoral reform, the analyst forecasting the composition of the seventeenth and eighteenth Lok Sabhas, or the researcher comparing gender-quota regimes—the 106th Amendment is best understood as enacted but dormant law. Its significance lies in the constitutional commitment it embeds and in the conditional architecture that will govern its activation. Anyone assessing the trajectory of women's political representation in India must track three moving parts in sequence: the conduct of the next Census, the ensuing delimitation, and the rotation framework Parliament adopts. Until those align, the headline figure of one-third reservation remains a statutory promise rather than an operative rule shaping the floor of either House.